The Annual Procedures Checklist

Derek Nichols

In cased you missed it previously, we’re (again) talking about Annual Procedures and everything you need to know before the current school year comes to a close.How much would a wood chuck check if a wood chuck could check lists? Hopefully, they’d check everything! With the end of the school year rapidly approaching, we’ve put together a list of items that managers should be sure to review.

To get started, view the online help about annual procedures and your school’s “Policies and procedures” guide.

Depending on your school’s setup, you’ll complete the various steps necessary to close out the current academic year and prepare for the upcoming one. These may include:

• Create or review upcoming school years and terms to prepare for new, incoming students. You’ll need these before you can create courses, activities, advisories, and dorms.
• Publish upcoming years and terms. Then, if necessary, hide any past years that users should no longer access.
• Create sessions and dates for athletics.
• Add and update users.
• Review and update role memberships.
• Update faculty members. If you withdraw an employee, remember to also withdraw them from their groups. Otherwise, they’ll retain their access to the group as a past employee.
• Update students. This includes graduating, promoting, withdrawing, and repeating current students.
• Either rollover data to the next year or import data into the next year. Do not use both rollovers and imports; that would duplicate data.
• Edit the upcoming school year to become the current year.
• Enroll incoming students as current students by reclassifying them.
• Review the content throughout your school website and the community to ensure that it is up to date. This may also include updating forms and your school’s privacy policy. Be sure to review the What’s New post from May 16, which describes recent enhancements to help you comply with privacy laws.
• Update group page settings and access for academics, activities, advisories, athletics, and dorms.
• Review your admissions settings and candidates. You may need to determine which entering years appear as options on inquiry forms, designate the upcoming admissions year as the current year, enroll accepted candidates, update role membership to the incoming student or student roles, deactivate candidates who aren’t enrolling, and update their role membership to be past candidates.
• Review existing authorizations for the “legacy” ON API. You’ll also grant and revoke access for users who manage the integrations, regenerate tokens, and use the updated tokens (keys and secrets).
• Review the existing keys and certificates for your single sign on (SSO). The exact steps will vary based on whether you use Microsoft Azure AD, SAML 2.0, ADFA Metadata, Google G Suite, or Okta. Ensure they won’t expire during the upcoming academic year.
• Handle updates for any integrations. For example, you might set emergency contacts for new students if you use an integration to send automated text messages or phone calls.

Your school will likely have additional annual procedures specific to your school’s policies and procedures. For example, you might update locker assignments or collect feedback surveys.

Soon, platform managers will also be able to access online help about annual procedures from the Tasks section of their Home page in Core. This link will be visible all year round. If you have suggestions or requests that you’ll like us to include in this help topic, please use the community to send a direct message to Bryna Gleich.

As always, you can also discuss best practices for these annual procedures with your peers in this user community.

Vicky Lopuchowycz

Thank you for posting this! I know what needs to be done, but it's helpful to have a reference point to go back to in those “what am I forgetting?” moments!