Program Locking for Reporting, Compliance, and Clarity for Students with Multiple Programs
Once students have completed a program with their institution, progress of that program should no longer change in Stellic. If the audit recomputed for any additional courses a student takes beyond what was required in their degree program, confusion and inaccuracy could be the result. Program Locking can be especially helpful for students pursuing multiple degrees at once when greater clarity about remaining requirements in a single program is needed.
What is it?
Locking a program enables users to freeze the progress of a program audit (either planned or official) in place.
- Once a program is locked, users will not be able to:
- make an exception
- request an exception
- fulfill Milestones
- prioritize courses
- add courses or placeholders to their plan and have it reflect in their planned audit
- Once a program is locked, any updates to data will not:
- Impact audit progress
- Change the audit version
- Change the requirements in the audit, even if edits were made and published to the audit version applied to the student
Who can do it?
- Admin users with the permissions to either change_audit or make_exception will be able to lock or unlock the progress of a program on a student. A user would be able to lock any program on the student that they have permission for.
- Alternatively, users with the permission combination of view_student AND make_exception for the student’s PROGRAM are able to lock or unlock the specific program that they have the make_exception permission for.
- Students can NOT lock any programs at any time. This feature is explicitly for admin users.
- Any user with permission to lock a program is also able to unlock the program.
When can a program be locked?
- At any time. There will be a recommendation that pops up if the program has all of its requirements completed but the program is still unlocked, but a program can be locked even if it’s not completed.
Recommendation when program is completed but still unlocked:
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Warning when locking a program:
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Users cannot lock a program if there are pending actions on the audit.
If there are pending exceptions, the lock program option is greyed out.
If there are pending Milestone requests, users will receive an error message.
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- NOTE: Right now, a Milestone attempt is recorded as soon as a user clicks on the record attempt button, even if they don’t take further action.
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Auto-locking
Programs will automatically lock when we receive data that a program has been certified by the institution.
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- Institutions that do not send program certification data will not have auto-locked programs.
- Universal requirements cannot currently auto-lock, though this may change in the future. Currently we do not receive program information from institutions on uni reqs, therefore we do not know when they are certified.
How do you lock a Program?
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At the top program level of the audit, a user with appropriate permission can click on the three dots next to the program name to view options. Lock Program is an option listed in this menu.
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The warning message will always be prompted when locking a program, regardless of whether the program’s progress is completed.
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Once locked, there is a blue “locked” message on the audit. Clicking on the three dots next to the program name gives significantly fewer options.
How do you unlock a program?
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To unlock a locked program, click on the three dots next to the program name at the top level of the audit and select “Unlock Program”. Only users with appropriate permissions will be able to unlock the program.
- A warning message will appear for users and they will need to confirm before the program can be unlocked. Unlocking an audit automatically triggers audit progress re-computation.
This means that:
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- If the student has taken new courses since locking, they may be considered for requirements.
- If there have been any courses or placeholders added to the planned version, they may be added into the audit.
- If the audit version has had edits made, those edits will now be reflected on the student’s audit (this cannot be undone).
- If the scope of the audit has changed and the student would have a different audit version applied, that will also be reflected upon recompute. While this can be undone, if any exceptions are lost in this process
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Once a user clicks “OK”, the audit will recompute and the locked icon disappears. The user can then re-lock the audit if desired.
What else do I need to know?
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Using a course that exists in a locked program within an exception on another program generates this warning that indicates that programs that are locked will always receive priority of using the course, which means the user’s exception may not work if double counting between those programs is not allowed.
Locking and unlocking a program generates plan activity.
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Users can manually lock official and planned audits separately. In other words, manually locking a planned audit will not also lock the official audit - users would need to take an additional action to lock the official audit.
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Auto-locking will lock both.
What happens if a Program is Certified, but the Audit is not yet published?
When the Audit is published, Stellic will compute progress before Auto-locking the Program.