Create Courses and Sections - Genius Enterprise Legacy/Custom

*Please note that if you have customized your instance of Genius, your site might operate differently.

It is important to clarify the difference between Courses and Sections.  A course in Genius is a subject or topic to be taught, similar to a master course template in an LMS.  You determine if learners can self-register for it, whether it requires approval, or if it has any pre-requisites?  A section is an instance or version of a course that is being offered at a particular time, or being taught by a particular teacher. Learners are always enrolled into a section of a course. So, you could have a course called “Computers 101”, and that course could have two sections: one offered in the evening, one in morning. 

First, create your master course template (containing learning content) for the topic you plan to teach in Blackboard Learn.  Then, create a corresponding Course in Genius by going to the Courses link on the Left menu and clicking on the “Add Course” link.   

You will then link the course in Genius to the master course template in Blackboard, by entering the Blackboard course ID of the master course template in the field “Blackboard ID” in the Genius Course.

Once you have a course, you can create Sections in Genius every time you want to teach a new version of that Course topic.  Whenever you create a new Section in Genius, Genius will create a copy of your master course template in Blackboard.  To create a new section, you can go to the Sections link on the Left menu and click on the “Add Section” link or from the course you can click on the add section link.  When creating a section, you determine the name, instructor (facilitator), term, enrollment cap (capacity), credits (credit hours), affiliation, status, certificate, start date, end date, attendance measure, duration, LMS, LMS Course ID,  location, delivery (method), price, external link (url if this course is not linked to the LMS), room requests, notes and meeting times.  You can also determine the delivery approach: online, face-to-face, or hybrid.  If it is online or hybrid, specify the LMS where you want the Section to be created by Genius.  You can also specify the Course ID that you would like used when the Section is created in the LMS.  If you specify an affiliation, only learners from that affiliation may be enrolled in that section.  If you want learners from multiple affiliations to be enrolled in one section, then the affiliation for that section must be “Any”. 

Clicking on the Sections link in the left-hand margin will display a list of all active sections, including information such as start date, facilitator and the number of enrollments.