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Departments

Brooke Henshall
  • Updated

error_outline Only administrators and department admins can perform this action

Departments are a hierarchal layer which you can create within your school. Departments can be used to separate different studies or courses from each other. The use of departments can be useful for schools that want to separate roles within their school to avoid users having too many rights and authorizations. In this article, everything about departments & studies and underlying concepts such as management of departmental roles and departmental insights is explained.

Departments & studies

As mentioned above, departments are a hierarchal layer that can be created within your school. Next to schools and departments, there are three other layers. The basic roles that Ans provides can be mapped to these layers. This is illustrated below. The blue boxes are the five layers in Ans, the yellow boxes next to it are the role(s) that are allocated to that particular layer.

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As you can see in the picture above, it is possible to create an admin role for the school but you can also create a department admin role. The department admin role will have full access to anything that is created within the department. As you can see, this includes all studies, courses and assignments. Additionally, a departmental admin has some extra options such as user management and department settings.

A study is the third hierarchical layer in Ans. Studies are mandatory when using departments. For each course that is created, you'll need to choose a study to which the course belongs. Unlike departments, studies do not contain a default role. If you want to create a role that has access to all courses within a study, you should either add this user to all underlying courses or create a separate department. The complete overview of roles is explained in the article Roles & Permissions in Ans.

Manage departments

By default, all administrators and department admins will have access to the department menu within the school settings. Department admins will only be able to edit the departments to which they have access. They can also add new departments. Lastly, they will see all other departments, but they will not be able to edit these departments. To navigate to the department menu within the school settings and add a department, follow the steps below.

  1. Click the domainSchool name in the menu on the left.
  2. Click settingsSettings in the menu at the top.
  3. Click Departments in the menu on the left.
  4. Click New department and fill in a name.

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To change the name of your department, follow the steps below.

  1. Click on the Name of the department.
  2. Click Settings, next to the Studies button.
  3. Change the name of the department and confirm your changes by clicking 'Rename'.

Below the menu for changing the name of the department, you can manage department admins. First, you can add a new department admin by clicking Add department admin. A popup will appear to find the user that needs to be added. Please note that only users with a role department admin, or a custom role that is based on the department admin role are visible here. Check the user(s) that you want to add and click Save.

You can remove the department admins by clicking the more_horiz-icon and selecting Remove department admin.

At the bottom of the screen, you can remove the department and all underlying studies by clicking Delete. In the popup that appears, click Confirm to delete the department. If you remove a department, all courses will not be deleted. The studie(s) allocated to the courses will be removed. It is possible to manually add new studies to these courses via the course settings menu.

Manage studies
As soon as you created your departments, you will have to add at least 1 study to your department. Most schools use departments as an equivalent for faculties, which contain different studies. A study can only be allocated to 1 department. As mentioned before, it is not possible to define a role on study level. You will have to manually add users to all courses in a study. To add studies to your department, follow the steps below.
  1. Click the domainSchool name in the menu on the left.
  2. Click settingsSettings in the menu at the top.
  3. Click Departments in the menu on the left.
  4. Click on the Name of the department.
  5. Click on New study and fill in the name of the study

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After adding a study, you can add existing courses or create new courses that will be added to the study. It is possible to add courses to multiple studies.

Further use of studies and departments

In the sections above, the use of departments and studies to separate roles and set your school structure is described. Using departments and studies has other benefits as well. Ans provides multiple insights on a departmental level and studies can be used to filter certain interfaces for a better overview. The following insights and filters can be found in the platform:

Study filter in the courses overview

In the overview of all courses in your school, you can filter on one specific study to see all courses that are allocated to that study. By default, Ans will show all courses of all studies.

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Overview of usage per department

In the school insights, you can filter on the usage of one or more departments. The usage graph shows the number of active users per month. An active user is a student with at least 1 result in the previous 12 months. If you filter on the number of students per department, the graph will only count the number of active users that have a result in assignments that are allocated to courses and studies within the selected departments.

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Overview of assignment takings per department

The second filtered overview is in the assignment takings. In this overview, the amount of written and digital assignment takings are shown. You have the possibility to adjust this graph for all assignments within courses and studies of the selected department(s).

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Assignment analysis per study

The third and last filter that is provided by Ans in the school insights is the study filter in the assignment analysis. Ans provides a filter to select one or more studies. Ans also provides filters for all studies (the default filter) and assignments without studies. In the filter menu, you can also see the department to which the study belongs.

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