Academic Scheduler Help: Class Linker


If you do not have any courses that have associated labs then you will not need the class linker. Recall that the one restriction of this program is that each course is taught by a single professor. So if you have lab courses where the lab can be taught by a different professor then the lab should be created as a separate course (the same would hold true if one lecture course could have several labs). This creates a minor problem since now we have two courses in this program representing one in your schedule. So the solution is to tell the program which labs are associated with which courses. To do this we have constructed a linking system.

To open the linker select View > Class Linker... from the main menu or click on the appropriate toolbar button. The linker should look something like the image below.

At the top is a small toolbar with two buttons, the first links courses and the second unlinks courses. Below this there are two identical course listings containing all of the courses currently in the schedule. The left list is for selecting the main or lecture course and the right is for selecting the lab or subsequent course. The program will allow you to link any courses together although you will probably use this only for labs. With the linker you can link any number of labs or subsequent courses with a single main course. You can not link a subsequent course with more than one main course. When you link the courses the link information will appear in the bottom list, as shown below. To link a course simply select the main and subsequent courses from the lists and click on the link button in the toolbar. For example, to get the first link in the image below you would have selected COSC 120-001 in the main list and COSC 120L-001 in the lab list and clicked the link button.

Likewise, the second item was created by selecting COSC 120-002 in the main list and COSC 120L-002 in the lab list and clicked the link button. The third from selecting COSC 350-001 in the main list and COSC 350L-001 and COSC 350L-002 in the lab list and clicked the link button.

When courses are linked the reporting system uses the main class information for the name of the course. So the first link we did above would be reported as just COSC 120-001 with the days and times of both the lecture and lab. Also note that when a link is made both the main and subsequent courses are removed from the lists.

To unlink a class, select any entry in the link information section for the courses you wish to unlink and click the unlink button.