myCourses is driven by an information feed from the Registrar's office. This feed handles the creation of credit-bearing courses, instructor assignments, and student enrollments (Adds, Drops, and Withdrawals).

Index

Feed Timing

The feed is sent to myCourses once each morning at 3:00am Eastern and concludes about 5:00am Eastern. Any changes made throughout the day will not be reflected on myCourses until the next day's information feed is supplied to us.

The feed for an academic session runs from eight weeks before the session through the last day of final exams.

Feed Dates and Milestones - Regular Academic Session

The impact of each milestone is explained following the table.

All dates shown are for the Regular Academic Session in that term. If your course is run under a different session your dates will vary, please refer to the milestones below to calculate the dates for your session based on the start date for that session in PeopleSoft.

Refer to https://www.rit.edu/calendar for the academic calendar.


Academic Term

Code

Courses Generated / Student Enrollments

Student Access

Classes Begin

Fall Semester

2221

June 27, 2022

August 8, 2022

August 22, 2022

Spring Semester

2225

November 22, 2022

January 3, 2023

January 17, 2023

Summer Session

2228

March 23, 2023

May 4, 2023

May 18, 2023

Fall Semester

2231

July 3, 2023

August 14, 2023

August 28, 2023

Courses Generated

Credit-bearing courses are generated on myCourses eight weeks before the start date of the session.

Courses listings, course titles, and faculty assignments are all dependent on the information entered in to the registrar's records by the scheduling officers of the academic department.

Instructors will only see a course listed if they have have an active RIT Account and they have been properly assigned to the course in the Registrar's records by the scheduling officer of the academic department. An active RIT Account generally requires the Instructor to have an active contract with RIT and they must be in the Human Resources records.

Access is not available on the day their RIT Account is created due to the timing of the information feed, their new account and course assignments will be added to myCourses with the next run of the feed.

Student Enrollments

Student enrollments begin when courses are generated on myCourses, eight weeks before the start date of the session.

  • Students must have an active RIT Account for their enrollment to be supplied to myCourses. Instructors may see enrollments on SIS that are not reflected on myCourses due to this requirement. New activations will be supplied to myCourses with the next daily feed.
  • Students will not be able to see their courses listed on myCourses until date of the Student Access milestone.

Student Access

Students are granted access to courses two weeks before the start date of the session.

Prior to this date students will not see the course listed on myCourses.

This early access is to give the students time to acquaint themselves with the course, or have access to important information in advance. Instructors should not be giving work in advance of the start date of the course.

Classes Begin

This is the official start date of classes for the academic session. Refer to https://www.rit.edu/calendar for the academic calendar.

Early Access

myCourses cannot override the dates supplied in the feed from the Registrar's Office to provide early access to courses. All course milestones are driven by the dates of the academic session as defined in PeopleSoft.

If your program has courses that need to run on a different academic schedule, your academic department will need to work with the Registrar's Office significantly in advance of your need to define a new session. This is at the discretion of the Registrar's Office and is not addressed by myCourses or its support staff.

Ending Course Access

Currently myCourses does not restrict course access based on the set end date, courses will remain available to students on myCourses unless the instructor manually makes the course inactive.

In the My Courses listing students will see a statement of "Course ended" followed by the date, but the course link will remain active and students may enter the course.

An instructor may set a course as inactive:

  1. Enter the course they wish to make inactive.
  2. Select "Edit Course" on the navigation bar.
  3. Select the "Course Offering Information" link. This may be easier to find in the listing if you select Name at the top of the listing instead of Category.
  4. On the next page they will find a check box entitled "Course is active," uncheck this option.
  5. Click Save to make your change active.

When a course is inactive, students will not be able to access the course and it will not appear on their My Courses listing.

If you choose to make your course inactive at the start of the quarter to work on it, please take a moment to send out an email to your class to inform the students of your change to the course and when they can expect it to be active again.

Inactive courses are not listed for students in the My Courses listing. This leads to many calls to support from students thinking a course has disappeared or that there is an enrollment issue.

We appreciate you taking a moment to respect your students and keep them informed.

Authority of the feed for user access and roles

The information feed from the Registrar's Office is the authoritative source for course access and it will override access or roles that an instructor manually assigns in a course if it has conflicting information.

This will primarily be reflected in situations where an instructor wishes to add a student to a course and finds they are removed each time the feed runs due to a student having a drop on their record for the course.

If a student needs access to a course:

They should not enroll in the course and drop it.

If this situation does occur the user should have a role of Student or Instructor in the course and the instructor, not the user, can contact Academic Technology Support to address the issue.