Exchange Students and Class access

Jean Sudduth

We are hosting a group of exchange students at our school for a month. The program director at our school would like the students to be scheduled into classes to have a schedule to follow and to access class bulletin boards, assignments, etc. My initial thought is that we would need to “enroll” the students so they can be scheduled and receive access and then “withdraw” the students at the end of the month. I don't like this process as it skews report data for enrollment and withdrawal numbers, etc. How do BB schools handle exchange or temporary students?

Shirley Wagar

@Jean Sudduth That's precisely what I had to do with exchange students in our upper and lower schools. I enrolled them, aligning their start date with their arrival and withdrew them when they returned to their countries, but it was the only way I could schedule them and grant them access to class pages.

I assigned a unique prefix to their student ID number that allowed me to quickly identify them as exchange students, and I created a custom admin field for tracking purposes as well. That said, I'll still need to manipulate my enrolment and other statistical reports to account for the additional bodies, but it shouldn't be that much extra work.

Jean Sudduth

@Shirley Wagar
Thank you, Shirley, for your input, the prefix is a great idea. I do wish the whole record could be deleted, so that moving forward, years ahead, the data isn't skewed.

Shirley Wagar

@Jean Sudduth The whole record can be deleted from Core.

At present, we do not delete records, but we are discussing creating a data retention policy for cases like this and for past candidate records (if a candidate was an inquiry only, did not receive/declined an offer of admission, aged out of etc.) Unfortunately, Blackbaud does not appear to have a “global delete” feature to remove records, so it may be a painful undertaking if we do elect to remove outdated/unnecesssary records from our database.

Petra Hall

@Jean Sudduth Would using a School Program work?

Jean Sudduth

@Petra Hall Hello, Petra, what do you mean by School Program?

I am researching cloning the Student Role as an Exchange Student role, this, I think, would allow me to not include this role when running certain reports where I don't want the Exchange Students included.

Petra Hall

@Jean Sudduth On the Contact Card tab, in the General Information panel, there's a “School Program” field.

You could enroll them as regular students, then give them the School Program of “Exchange”, and set them up to audit classes (assuming they are going to be sitting in classes).

This avoids having a whole separate role for exchange students. But it does mean they look like regular students, unless people take a closer look. And the “Exchange” program will linger on their contact card, even if they are enrolled as a “regular” student sometime in the future. Maybe a different exchange “school program” for each year?

Maybe not a feasible option.