Integration
Timetabling alongside Ellucian Colleague
Colleague is driven by four-letter form mnemonics, and people who work in it speak them. Nobody says “the sections form”; they say SECT. This page is written in those, because that is what the conversation will sound like.
The course is a template; the section is the thing
CRSE defines the course once — name, credits, level, prerequisites, grading. SECT creates the specific offerings of it, and that is where meeting times, faculty and rooms live. Everything a timetable wants is at SECT level or hangs off it.
This is the same two-layer shape as PeopleSoft and Banner, and for an institution running several US systems that is genuinely useful: the boundary sits in the same place in all three, so the integration argument only has to be had once.
Which Colleague form holds what
| Colleague | What it holds | What the timetable does with it |
|---|---|---|
| CRSE | The course: name, description, credits, course level, prerequisites, locations, grading | Becomes the course. |
| COFF | Course offering information — instructional method and load | The teaching type, and the load figure that feeds workload balancing. |
| SECT | The specific offerings of a course, with their scheduling and assignments | The thing being scheduled. Almost every row below is reached from here. |
| Meeting times and days of the week | When the section meets | The session. |
| Meeting dates for an individual section | The actual dated occurrences | The week range, which is where a term that does not run end to end shows up. |
| Faculty instructional assignment | Who teaches it | The lecturer against the session. |
| Rooms and buildings | Where it meets | The room, where Colleague already holds one. |
| Academic level | Which students may register | Not timetabled, but it explains section sizes that look wrong. |
| Waitlist and waitlist criteria | What happens when a section fills | A section at its limit is a section whose room was too small, and that is a utilisation question. |
| Cross-listed sections | Sections sharing enrolment | One event, several groups. See combining student groups. |
| CREQ | Prerequisites, corequisites and corequisite noncourses | Corequisites are the interesting ones: two sections a student must take together must not be scheduled together. |
Which direction each thing travels
Into the timetable: the term’s sections from SECT, with instructional method, capacity, faculty and any cross-listing. Out: meeting times, days and room, matched back on the section.
The corequisite trap is worth naming. A corequisite recorded on CREQ says two sections must be taken in the same term; a timetable that does not read it will happily put them in the same hour, and the first anyone hears of it is at registration.
The general form of this argument is in integrating your timetable with your SIS.
What we do not have, said plainly
There is no Ellucian Colleague connector in this product and no Ellucian partnership. The same sentence appears on our Banner page, and for the same reason.
What there is: Excel, CSV, XML and a documented REST API, described in importing data and SIS integration. A Colleague report is a file, and a file is the whole mechanism.
GET https://wise-tt.com/api/v2/meta answers without a token — see the REST API.
Want to see this working?
Book a 45-minute online presentation and we will walk through it against your institution's own scheduling problem.