Educational institution website help . . .

Hi,

I'm building a website for educational purposes. I've tried to install phpedu, which was about the only module I could find nearest to my need. But I encountered a number of challenges, so I decided to build my site using existing modules.

My present project is all about building an educational website to drive eLearning and course registrations.

First I have decided not to tinker with the Drupal core and as much as possible maintain the modules I'll be using to make upgrading the site a lot more easy for the admin. Therefore I decided to use available drupal modules to achieve my project.

The details of my project are thus;

I need to be able to allow students register their courses on the site. Students will be grouped in classes and each class will have a staff course advicer. The students will register their course, which will be kept in a pending state, until the course advicer verifies and validates the students submission. Each course advicer is to have access to only the class attached to him/her.

Each course has credit unit load, and there is a minimum and maximum total credit unit loads allowed for any student to register for any semester. Courses also have a course code. Study on the site is based on a two semester year/session. Some academic programmes will last for 8 semesters (being 4 years) or 10 semesters (being 5 years). The institution is also divided into colleges (i.e College of Engineering), each with several departments (i.e Department of Computer Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering). Each course belongs to a particular department, but will be available to other departments as required by the Academice Program of the institution (i.e. Math 201, is obviously a course of the Deparment of Mathematics and will be taken by students from several academic programmes in other departments. For instance engineering students will also take some Mathematics courses, which actually belong to other departments.) The records for each students registered courses are to be seen on the students profile, only by the student and his course advicer and any other priviledged role.

So far I've been able to create colleges, departments, classes, and courses as groups. My plan is to have each student register for each course (group) by subscribing to the course and then the course adviser can either approve or deny the subscription request. But since there will obviously be so many courses on the site, I'm thinking I'll use taxonomy to group courses into years (i.e. First year courses, second year courses, third year courses, etc), this will enable students to search for courses easily. For the courses, I plan to create courses on a yearly basis, in this way I can control the students who subscribe to a certain course, and then close course (group) subscription when course registration is over. Thus no new students can register for the course after it has closed registration or after the course has been taken. Course are planned to be created as yearly groups (i.e. for Math 201 for instance, I'll be creating each class in the format Math 201 - 2002/2003. This indicates that this is the Math 201 class for the 2002/2003 session. This is intended to allow each course class to be unique and distinc even after the course has been taken. The students who took the course still remain the same and no one else is admitted into that course. This secures the group in order that even years later, the list of those who took the course is still the same and remains intact.

Does my plan seem feasible? Does any one see an errors in my line of thought or implimentation? How can I impliment access for a particular course advicer to ONLY his/her associated class (group) students in order to be able to grant approval or deny subscription to courses? With a total of about 32 academic programmes at the moment, cutting across 5 years (i.e. classes), and with one course adviser per class, this totals to (32 x 5 = 160 classes) 160 course advicers. Will I have to create a role for each class course adviser? Or is there some other way to handle roles in this case?

The students profile is expected to list details of courses registered by the student per semester in all his/her stay with the institution. The semesterly course registration summary is expected to provided a computed field that calculates the total credit unit load amounting from the number of courses registered for each particular semester by the student. This information should only be available to the student, his/her course advicer and other priviledged roles.

Can any one out there post me some help.

Thanks all and Cheers.