About departments

Departments are a way of organizing rubrics, tables of contents, contact lists for messaging and sharing, newsletter recipients, and assessor lists so that only the appropriate people see them. It also provides you with another way to isolate data in your reporting. You can choose to see the results for only one department even though other groups use the assessment instrument. Assessors can be assigned to more than one department. Sub-administrators must be assigned to at least one department. On the Departments screen, you may sort and search a list of departments. The table of departments indicates how many faculty, students, themes, TOCs, and sub-administrators are associated with that department.

Adding a new department - Choose the Departments option from the Admin drop-down menu. Click the Add New Department link to the right of the screen.

Name your new department and choose members from the options list. Highlight the assessor names in the options list and use the arrows to move the names to the member list on the right.

Editing a department - Click the Edit link on the Actions drop-down menu for the department that you want to edit. Add additional names of users who are to be included in the department by highlighting and clicking the >> transfer button. Move users out of the department in the same way. Click the 'Save' button after each edit.

Hiding a department - To hide a department, click the ‘Departments’ option on the Admin drop-down menu. Choose the department and click the [Edit] link on the ‘Actions’ drop-down menu. Mark the ‘Hidden’ checkbox on the ‘Edit Department’ screen.

A hidden department is no longer visible to Students on the ‘My Portfolio’ page. This means that they cannot choose to join a department that is hidden. TOCs that belong to a hidden department are not available as options on the ‘Choose a Table of Contents’ list when creating a new portfolio. Portfolios that already use a hidden department TOC remain available for edit, but no new portfolios can be created using a TOC belonging to a hidden department. Hidden department rubrics and TOCs remain visible to administrators.