The Academic menu is the skeleton of the school. An academic year with its terms is the calendar every other screen measures against; a class is the group fees are priced for, results are ranked within and timetables are built for; a course is what a teacher is actually assigned to teach and what a learner is actually enrolled in. Booklists and the library are what turns that structure into a term a learner can feel.

Build it in one order and everything afterwards is easy. Academic Years first — the year and the terms and, if your school uses them, the sequences inside each term, with their start and end dates and one of them marked current. Classes second, each with a name, a short code and a type: a class stream, a university level or a vocational cohort. Courses third, each with a title, a code and a coefficient, attached to a class. Booklists and Library come last, once you know which classes and which courses exist.

Only a super administrator, an institution admin and a secretary see this menu. A bursar does not, even though the fee structures depend on the classes defined here — a separation that is deliberate, because pricing money and defining the school are two different decisions made by two different people.

One row per level of the calendar

Open Academic > Academic Years and the list is a tree. A row of type Academic Year is the year; rows of type Term hang under it; rows of type Sequence hang under a term for schools that teach in sequences rather than in three terms. Semester and Cohort Duration exist for the other programmes. Every row carries a Title, an Abbreviation shown on broadsheets and slips — S1, T1 — a Position that fixes its order, a start date and an end date.

Tick Current on exactly one

The Current flag is what the rest of the portal asks when it needs to guess which term you are in. Mark the term you are living in and every screen opens on the right one: grade entry, booklists, course schedules, fee structures, the dashboard periods. Mark two as current and the platform has to choose between them; mark none and it falls back to the newest, which is occasionally right and never intentional.

Close the year, do not delete it

When the year ends, switch Active off rather than removing rows. Past results, past receipts and past report cards all read from these records, and a year that has been deleted takes its published figures with it. Create next year’s rows beside the old ones, nest the same terms underneath, and set one of them current.

A class is priced, ranked and scheduled

In Academic > Classes, a row is a Name, a short Code and a Type. Use Class Stream for First Year, Second Year and so on; University Level for a higher-education programme; Vocational Cohort for a professional cohort. The code is what appears in narrow columns — use something a clerk can read at a glance. The colour is what identifies the class on the timetable grid and in the class board, so give each stream its own.

A course carries the weight of the subject

In Academic > Courses, each subject gets a Title, a Code and a Coefficient, attached to a class. The coefficient is not decoration: it is how heavily the subject counts in the class average and in the broadsheet ranking, so mathematics at 3 and handwriting at 1 is a real decision that belongs to the head of school, not to whoever types the row. Set the Assessment template on the same screen — a course without one cannot receive marks.

Inside a course: modules and lessons

Open a course to reach its content. Lessons sit inside modules, and both can be renamed, reordered by dragging, and switched between a module and a standalone lesson. Reorder deliberately: the order you leave them in is the order a learner meets them. Two settings are worth checking deliberately: Require lessons in order, which stops a learner jumping to the last unit before finishing the first, and Provide certificate, which decides whether completing the course earns a certificate at all.

Who teaches it

Teachers are attached to a course from the Teachers column, and the same assignment is what puts the course in that teacher’s My Courses list. Assigning a course and scheduling it are two different acts: the first decides who teaches it, the second decides when and where. A course with a teacher and no timetable slot exists on paper; a slot with no teacher exists as a clash waiting to happen.

A booklist is a promise to one class

In Academic > Booklists, a list belongs to one academic year and one class. Give it a Title families will recognise, add the books one by one, and switch Published on when it is complete. A published booklist appears in the learner app for that class, so the family sees exactly the titles and quantities the school expects — and the secretary can print the same list for a family who prefers paper.

One book, two jobs

The Library is the catalogue behind the store and the lending shelf. A book has a title, an author, a format — PDF, Audio, Video or HTML — a cover, an optional link to the course it belongs to, and the levels it is meant for. Leaving the levels empty makes it available to the whole school. Tick Payable and give a Price in XAF to sell it on the Ekati store; leave it unticked to lend the printed copy only. A Discount amount can be set separately, which is how you run a second-term promotion without changing the price everyone else pays.

Why the levels matter

Levels are what stop a first-year parent being shown a university text. Set them when you catalogue, not after a complaint: the same title is often required by two classes with different editions, and the level decides which one a family is shown.