Creating new Terms (or semesters) for upcoming enrolments is one of the regular tasks you will have to do in RIO Education. RIO includes some automation to make this easier (like being able to clone en-masse course offerings from previous terms), but other things have to be set up manually.

Please use this article as reference or a checklist whenever the time comes to set up a new term. Every institute's exact requirements are different, but you should aim to have the entire data setup ready before enrolments begin for that term, to ensure those enrolments inherit the correct data.

Create the Term Record

The first step is to create the Term record itself. There are a number of important fields you should fill out, as we have done in the example image below. These fields are:

• Account: This should lookup to the Education Institution this term belongs to. Even if you only manage one institution through RIO, it needs to be populated.
• Previous Term: We need to also reference the previous term. This is important for pathway generation as RIO needs to know how terms fit together. For example, if we enrol in a six term long program that starts 2027 Term 1, our second term should be 2027 Term 2, 2027 Term 3, and so on to 2028 Term 3. For this reason you should consider creating Term records several years ahead of time, and come back to do the rest of the setup closer to the enrolment period.
• Start and End Date: These dates indicate when the term actually takes place.
• Census Date: This date indicates when the student enrolments into this term are finalised. Depending on your configured fee method, if a student withdraws from a course before this date, their fees are dropped, but if they withdraw afterwards, they are still financially liable.
• Enrollment Open and Close Date/Time: These dates signify when the enrollment wizard will let your students enrol into their courses, on a first-come first-served basis. This is only a default value - you can override this on a course level if you need to.
• Session Open and Close Date/Time: Similar to the above, but specifically for sessions. You may wish to open course enrolment first in order to gauge demand, so you can book appropriately sized rooms. Again, this is a default which can be overridden per-session.

Feel free to refer to the Term documentation for further information on this setup.

Set up Term Holidays

If there are any holidays that take place during this term, where classes should not be held, we'll need to signify this by creating a “Term Holiday” record. This connects a specific Holiday with this new Term you have just made. It's important to do this before scheduling any sessions.

Open up the Holidays tab to create a Term Holiday, and then press the new button. The Term field will already be populated, so you'll only need to enter the Holiday itself. If no records appear, you can use the option that appears to create a new Holiday - refer to the documentation if you're unsure.

Repeat this process as many times as you need to capture all of that term's holidays.

Clone the Course Offerings

Probably the most time consuming part of setting up a new term is adding the Course Offerings, i.e. the list of courses which will be held in this term. Luckily, RIO provides an automation to help speed this up.

If you've set up a term before, you can simply clone the list of the Course Offerings from that Term into this one. If the Offerings are not exactly the same, that's no problem, you can then delete or add any extras that you need. This is a big time saver which can turn a day or more of effort into only a few minutes.

By default, the Term Offerings Cloning feature is under the “Term Management” tab, but your layout may look different if you've customised RIO. This screen now shows the list of clone jobs that have happened before for this term. As it's new, we expect this list to be empty. Press the “New” button to get started.

In the first screen, select the Term and Campus you wish to clone from. You'll then see a list of the courses found. If you want to copy all of them, proceed to the next screen. Otherwise, change the dropdown under “Select Courses” to “Manual Selection”, and you will have the option to choose exactly which courses to bring over.

The next screen is similar, but for the Course Offerings belonging to those Courses. In this example, we want to copy all of them, but again, you can choose to copy only some if you wish.

You'll then have some additional options to select. The first is an option on whether to rename the Course Offerings or keep the existing names as is.

You also get an option for if you wish to copy the Sessions (and their Session Times) over too. This can be a further time saver if you know things will be held at the same times. If you select Yes for this, you'll get a third option asking if you would like to rename or retain the existing Session names.

After clicking Next, you'll see one final confirmation screen. Review your choices, and if everything looks right, then click the Add Job button. This will submit the request into RIO's background job queue.

Depending on the number of courses and sessions you have selected, this may take a few minutes to complete. Please make use of the refresh button to keep an eye on the process. Eventually it will move from Processing to Complete, and your Course Offerings will be cloned in to this new Term. If you need to make further changes, now is the time to do so.

Add the Fee Schedule Terms

The next step is to then add the fees that will be charged this term. We do this by connecting Fee Schedules - the records that hold the actual fee amounts - with the Term record in order to say “in this term, this much should be charged for this fee”.

This works exactly like how you added the Term Holidays earlier - when you create a new Fee Schedule Term record, the Term field should already be populated, and you will only have to select the fee schedule.

Make sure to review all your fees and add the relevant schedules to the term. If you are missing one, an error will stop the fees from being created.

Schedule Sessions

You will now need to use the Session Scheduler to create sessions, give them times, and assign them to facilities around campus. For information on how to use the scheduler, please refer to our documentation on creating sessions here.

If you earlier cloned the courses from another term, you may also have cloned the Sessions and Session Times too. Remembering that Session and Session Times are just template objects, you will still need to generate the bookings, which are the actual events that students and faculty alike will see on their calendars. Use the Scheduler for this too.

If everything you cloned is still correct for this term - i.e. every session will be at the same time in the same facility - and no changes need to be made, you can quickly make use of the “Session Booking Generation” wizard, bypassing the scheduler completely. This feature is available in RIO Education 3.22 onward. Similar to the Term Offerings Cloning tool we walked through earlier, you will get the options to select the campus, courses and sessions you wish to generate the bookings for.

Now when I check the Scheduler, I can see that many of my sessions have green icons, meaning they are successfully scheduled. I can see that some are still yellow - these are the ones I will still need to check and schedule manually.

Other Tasks

With the core term setup finished, you may wish to review your Program Plans and their “Next Starting Term” field.

This field will be used to automatically populate the Starting Term on new applications into this program, so if it's pointing to an old term you should consider changing it to point to the new one instead.