| Contact | Chief Data Officer, Office of the CIO |
|---|---|
| Intended audience: | Internal UBC |
| UDM Domain | Academic |
| Applicability | Credit |
| Guideline ID | DG0003 |
Definition
Course Private Notes is the field where additional administrative details that are not visible to students will be entered for a course. This field will be used to indicate, if applicable, the course’s variable credit values for other systems to access via integration. Notes from the existing Curriculum Management System will also be converted into Private Notes.
Purpose
Due to the complexity of the data the Course Private Notes attribute has not been standardized. In lieu of a data standard, these guidelines have been created to provide recommendations around the data entry for Course Private Notes to encourage consistency. Please note that Course Private Notes differ from Course Public Notes, which should not be used as per the Course Data Standard.
For more details on Course Private Notes, please see the Course Data Standard.
Guideline
The following guidelines should be observed when entering text in Course Private Notes:
- Plain, succinct language is recommended. Any user should ideally be able to see the text in context and understand the meaning.
- Abbreviations are not recommended except for approved acronyms that are listed in the University Glossary. Abbreviations can obscure the meaning of a term.
- Special characters should be avoided unless part of the distinctive element (for example, using curly brackets '{}', a hyphen '-', or forward slash '/' as part of listing the variable credit values for a course, e.g., {3-6} or {3/6}.
- Numerals should be avoided unless they are part of the distinctive element. (E.g., {3-6} for variable credits)