Updated: October 2021
Description: AEFIS uses terminology both in the user interface and in the AEFIS Help Resources guides that may or may not reflect the terminology used at your institution. These terms are built into all AEFIS instances, and are not able to be changed or edited by users. Please see below for a list of common terms.
| Term | Description |
| Assessment | An "Assessment" in AEFIS is a term based manager of Program Assessment. It allows the user to set start/end dates of Program Assessment and choose which course sections are included in that term's Program Assessment process. Each Program will have one Assessment instance per term where course sections tied to Courses in the Program Curriculum Map are present in AEFIS. |
| Assignment Linking | The act of creating a relationship between an outcome and an assignment so that assignment scoring data may populate in reports on that outcome. |
| Assignment Samples | This is a section in a course section that can be created through a related Program's setting to enable assignment samples. This allows the course section instructor/director to select a student submission of work that meets a specific criteria. This creates a repository of examples of student work that represent different skill levels as defined by the program, selected by the faculty, for administrators to access and use as samples in accreditation reports, for example. This is not a feature that automatically pulls studet submissions meeting an assessment criteria into a repository. The faculty member or administrator must select and add the student work into this area of the course section to collect the samples. |
| Business Object | Business Objects in AEFIS are a way AEFIS describes a number of items on this list. Some examples or Business Objects are Colleges, Departments, Courses, Programs, and Self Studies. This terminology is typically seen in the User Manager, when prompted to assign a Business Object to a user role - such as a College Admin role would require the selection of one or more Colleges as the business object that the role would refer to. |
| CLO | Course Learning Outcome. These are outcomes that live within a Course, which is up at the Course Catalog level. |
| College | College is the layer of the AEFIS Hierarchy directly below the Institution, and is created through the import of your Course Catalog file. You may have multiple Colleges within your hierarchy in AEFIS. Colleges can own many departments, or only own one department. College names may not be changed in the AEFIS User Interface. Any changes to College Name or Code, or departments owned by the college must occur in the data file import. Colleges do not have to match what your institution calls a College. Depending on your hierarchy, you may have a 1:1 relationship between Institution and College. An example of this occurs at Community Colleges and other two year institutions. There are other cases where what some Institutions refer to as Colleges are actually called Schools or Faculties. The term College in AEFIS is general, and you may determine where the AEFIS College fits with your institution's hierarchy. |
| Course | A Course in AEFIS is like a Course in your Course Catalog. It is relatively static, and is not tied to a term. There is no enrollment or faculty associated with a Course. This is where Course Learning Outcomes and Default Syllabi live in AEFIS, as well as the Course Description, so those items can be pushed down to the term-based Course Sections when imported through your data files. Courses are imported into AEFIS through your data files, and the only features of a course that may be changed in AEFIS are the CLOs, Syllabus Defaults, Survey Questions and Assignments. Details such as credits, Subject Code, Course Number, Description and Course Name can not be changed in the AEFIS user interface. |
| Course Section | Course Sections are term-based instances of a Course which include student enrollment and faculty information. This is where direct assessment of student learning outcomes takes place, and is also the level at which student and faculty course evaluations are administered. Course Sections are where AEFIS integrates with your Learning Management System (LMS) when applicable. While additional faculty and enrollment may be added to Course Sections via the AEFIS user interface, we recommend that you make changes to Course Sections through your data file import when possible. |
| Course Section Learning Outcome |
This is a measurable student learning outcome that lives in a unique course section. Assessment data on these outcomes can not be collected longitudinally, and can not pass data through the hierarchy in AEFIS. |
| sCLO | sCLO stands for Course Section Learning Outcome. This is a measurable student learning outcome that is added exclusively in a single course section. It is not able to be measured longitudinally, and is tied to a particular term. This is used if faculty want to track student learning outcomes in addition to those defined at the Course, Program, Department, College, Institution or Accreditor, if at all. These can be copied following the same faculty/instructor in AEFIS to future terms, but the data on these outcomes are not aggregated across terms. |
| Curriculum Map | Curriculum Maps exists within a Program, and is the location where relationships built between Accreditor, Institution, College, Department and/or Program Learning Outcomes and Courses/Course Learning Outcomes in AEFIS. The Curriculum Map exists to show alignment between outcomes and Courses, and to determine what outcomes will be assessed in a specific course in one of those outcome sets. A curriculum map is required to complete direct assessment of student learning outcomes at the Program level. A curriculum map is NOT required to complete direct assessment of student learning outcomes for Course Learning Outcomes only. |
| Data Collection | Data Collections are a form and workflow solution in AEFIS that allow you to automate the collection of data input using workflows. This solution integrates with other solutions such as Curriculum Mapping to display outcomes from a curriculum map, or to Surveys/Course Evaluations to display evaluation results on a Faculty Promotion and Tenure Data Collection form. |
| Department | Department is the layer of the AEFIS Hiearchy directly below College, and is created through the import of your Course Catalog file. Departments can own Courses and Programs in AEFIS. This level of the hierarchy does not need to match exactly what you call a Department at your Institution. Some institutions, such as Community Colleges and other two year institutions, will align the AEFIS departments with their Course subject codes, for example. |
| Educational Experience | Refers to Courses, Course Sections, Co-curricular Activites and Co-curricular Sections. These are locations where student learning and assessment may be defined and/or occur. |
| Hamburger Menu | Hamburger refers to a three line icon that takes the user to the main menu on the website. |
| Hierarchy | AEFIS has a hierarchy within the system, that determines permissions for user roles and relationships between items or "business objects" within AEFIS. Hierarchy levels are generally set by your Course Catalog data file, and creates the relationship between Institution, College, Department and Course. |
| ILO | ILO stands for Institution Learning Outcome. These measurable student learning outcomes can be added to any Program's curriculum map and allow you to collect Institution-wide student learning outcome across multiple Colleges, Departments and Programs. These outcomes can only be measured when added to a Program, so they must be included in a Program curriculum map. |
| Institution | Institution is the highest level of the hierarchy of objects in AEFIS. Typically the Institution level of the hierarchy is your college or university. The Institution owns all of the data within your AEFIS database and Instituion level roles may view all data. |
| Kebab Icon | An icon with three vertical dots within a screen or widget, that allows you to open additional menus/options for that item. Commonly seen in dashboard widgets on the home page. |
| Manager Page | When navigating in AEFIS, many items have what you will hear referred to as the "_____Manager." A common example of this is the Course Manager page. This is the main home page for your Course Catalog, where you can search, filter and sort all of the Courses in the Catalog available in AEFIS. So when you hear the term manager page, it is referring to the screen where you may search for and manage an item in AEFIS. Other items that have manager pages are: Course Sections, Programs, Assessment, Faculty Portfolios, Survey Templates, Surveys, Syllabus Templates and Users. |
| Milestone Dates | These are the dates set within the Terms you build in AEFIS to guide your term-based files (Course Section, Registration and Degrees). They typically follow your Academic Calendar milestones such as First Day of Class, Last Day of Class, First Day of Exams, Last Day of Exams, Last day of Add/Drop, and Grade Due Date. These are used in the system to automate processes across multiple terms, such as setting the typical date to start a Student Course Evaluation, or when to automatically publish Syllabi to release them to students. |
| Multiple Assessors | This refers to a setting that may be enabled in either a Program or Assignment at the Course or Course Section level that allows more than one faculty member/assessor assigned to a course section to score the same student on the same assignment. The scores input by the assessors/faculty are then either averaged or selected as the final score, based on the settings chosen when the assignment was configured. |
| Outcome Set | This is a collection of measurable student learning outcomes that can be organized by the hierarchy within your AEFIS instance. AEFIS supports sets of outcomes that are housed at the External (Accreditor), Institution, College/Administrative Unit, Department/Administrative Division, Program and Course level. Outcome Sets that live in a Program or Course can not be measured outside of that level. Outcome Sets that are higher in the hierarcy - such as at the External (Accreditor), Institution, College or Department/Administrative Division can be used to collect data across multiple Programs and Courses. |
|
Outcome Set Accreditor |
Outcome Sets outside of a program have both Outcomes and Standards. Outcome sets have two sections - outcomes and standards. The "outcome sets" have two sections - one for outcomes and one for standards. Standards are added to Accreditor outcome set spaces only, and are in place specifically for use with the Self Study solution. The standards added can be tagged to evidence in the Self Study evidence bank and to create the sections of the Self Study for that accreditor (accreditor or internal standard set - like a Program Review). |
| Parent/Child Course Section | AEFIS allows you to create relationships between course sections that reflect crosslisting in your student information system or merged/crosslisted courses in your Learning Management System (LMS). These are reflected in the user interface with a link icon, and the primary section will be designated as the Parent, and any other linked/crosslisted sections will be designated as the child/children. |
| PLO | PLO stands for Program Learning Outcome. This is an Outcome Set that lives exclusively within a single Program, and direct assessment data can only be collected for those outcomes within the curriculum map of that Program. |
| Preceptor | A preceptor is a type of faculty role in AEFIS that has extremely limited permissions to access AEFIS. It is typically used for external users (users who do not sign into AEFIS using your single sign on configuration) who will assess a few students, or will participate in the Practicum solution to evaluate students. |
| Program | Programs are the organizational layer below Departments or Administrative Divisions. These can be created through a one-time Program import file or manually through the user interface in AEFIS. Programs are where curriculum maps -where the relationships between courses and Institution, College, Department, Accreditor or Program Learning Outcomes and Courses/Course Learning Outcomes are created. Programs can also be used to represent departments and other units within your instituion, for reporting on Program Review or other Institutional Effectiveness related Data Collection processes. |
| Random Sampling | This is a setting that can be enabled at the Program level, that requires that all assignments linked to outcomes within that Program's curriculum maps utilize the Random Sampling settings set at the Program. This will randomly select a percentage of student submissions within an assignment to score in the scorebook for that assignment. |
| Survey Template | This is the framework of your survey, whether it is a student course evaluation or general survey. It is where you create the structure of sections, questions and question types for your survey. A template is required to deploy any type of survey in AEFIS. |
| Syllabus Template | This is the framework of your syllabus. It is required to build the structure of sections, headers, and areas where users may input data. A syllabus template must be used to utilize the syllabus solution in AEFIS. |
| Term | This refers to your academic calendar of semesters/years/quarters/terms, and the code/name tied to that calendar in your Student Information System. Terms are built directly in the AEFIS User Interface, and guide data from your data files that is term based into the system. You frequently will see terms in the Course Section manager filters and as filters/parameters for reporting. Terms tie your direct and indirect assessment data specifically to your semester/year/quarter/term for reporting and organizational purposes. |
| Term Activation | This is the date chosen as part of of the creation of a Term in AEFIS, that determines when your system will start importing your Course Sections and related Registration, and will initiate any automated processes that you have set in your settings to copy from term to term. If your settings determine that assignments and assignment linking should copy from the previous term to the next term, this will happen on the Term Activation date. So any work completed in a previous term after the activation date will not automatically copy after that process is complete. |
| Term Type | The terms you create in AEFIS can have a type designation that will help you to control the term activation copying process if you offer special terms or different types of terms. An example would be courses are scheduled in both Semesters and Quarters. Those terms may have different syllabi content or assignments, so you would not want that to automatically copy from a Semester to a Quarter. Another example is if you have a special Winter term, that only runs for a week or two. In that case, you also would not want the Syllabus, Assignments or Course Evaluation schedule to copy into that term. Then a Winter term type may be set in the system so Winter data only copies from Winter term to Winter term. |
| User Interface | This is where you interact with AEFIS when you log in to your institution's AEFIS site. When the User Interface (UI) is referenced, it is typically to let you know that a user from your team may make changes directly in AEFIS without intervention from the AEFIS support team. |
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