TLC provides multiple services to faculty to help prep for a semester. Two of these are Course Copies and Course Merges.

In the wind-down of fall semester and preparation for spring semester we are receiving requests that don’t match what instructors are expecting so here’s a brief primer on what these terms (and some others) mean in Brightspace so you can better request assistance.

Course Offering – The course offering is different from a section. At Wentworth, each section can be taught by a different instructor with different materials. When we feed the list of courses from Banner we feed both course offerings and sections to allow for the needs of different instructors. Initially, the course offering and course section have the same name.

Course Section – The course section is where students are enrolled. For most course sections, the section is placed in a course offering with the same name. But this placement can be changed.

Course Copy – When we copy a course, we copy content from one course offering (sometimes we call this a course site) to another course offering. We do this for you when the content is in another instructor’s course. But if you want to copy content from one semester to another for offerings you are the instructor, you can do this yourself.

Course Merge – The course merge process moves sections from one course offering and moves them to another allowing an instructor to post content once but have it available to all students in all the sections. This is a request TLC must complete for you.

Courses by Lynn Cooke

So when you need a course copied or merged, keep in mind what the various elements are when making your request so that you get the result you want.

Remember to include the full course number (including the section), CRN, and semester when making any request. We often receive requests for multiple semesters and providing the information with the initial request will speed the response.