In Full Fabric, a study plan is a comprehensive listing of a class's subject and course requirements for graduation, from which academic transcripts are derived. 🌾 It's essentially the skeleton of the programme as an organised body of study and fundamental for that reason. This article expounds on the importance of study plans and how to build them. 💪

➜ What is a study plan?

➜ How can I build a new study plan template for a class?

・How do I duplicate an existing study plan?

・Adding additional groups of elective subjects

・Editing a group of elective subjects

・Adding and editing subjects

・Setting the general properties of the study plan

・Sorting the subjects inside of the study plan

A study plan is the range of core, elective and extracurricular subjects that compose the entirety of a degree programme, with regards to which students must earn a given number of academic credits and fulfil other curriculum conditions (such as meeting minimum attendance levels, completion of all mandatory subjects, etc.) to be eligible for graduation. 👩‍🎓

Not only do study plans inform the rest of the system about the make-up of a programme, which is the first stepping stone towards course and student management, but it's based on them that transcripts are generated. 💎 You can read more about the relationship between study plan templates, individual transcripts and the academic calendar in this article.

The moment a new class is created, a blank study plan template is automatically produced by the system, accessible through an area we call the class overview. To locate the overview page of a given class, please read the instructions here.

Once inside, just look for the button Study plan template on the tab bar, displayed below:

As the name suggests, it's the entryway to the template itself, which typically looks like this:

Virgin study plan templates are split into three self-explanatory blocks by default: Core Subjects, Elective Subjects and Extracurricular Subjets. However, supplementary blocks of elective subjects can be added, as discussed further in the article under the topic Adding additional groups of elective subjects. However, what if you'd prefer not to start from square one but instead duplicate an existing study plan? Worry not, for we've got your back. 🤺

To expedite your workflow and reduce manual labour, it's possible to duplicate the study plan of another class rather than create a new one from scratch. Upon clicking the Study plan template button, as explained in the previous section, a modal window will appear with two choices.

If you choose the second option, Duplicate an existing study plan, you will then be prompted to select the programme and class whose study plan you wish to replicate. Additionally, you'll encounter a setting labelled Copy course selection for each study plan subject? which allows you to decide whether to migrate the course selections from the original study plan or not. If you opt for No, do not select any course, the study plan subjects will be made available for all courses by default instead of being restricted to any courses in particular (more information here).

Once you click Confirm and duplicate, you're free to make any modifications you see fit, because these will not impact the parent study plan.

The structure of a study plan template in Full Fabric follows the standard structure of an academic curriculum, thus encompassing core, elective and extracurricular subjects. 🎓 Accordingly, the template is visibly divided into three parts for clarity, each part – or, to be more precise, group –, concerning itself with a single specific type, as shown in the above screenshot. That said, you're given the option to add extra blocks of elective subjects to the template, such as to organise them into themes: for instance, elective subjects focused on Finance, electives focused on Strategy, electives focused on Entrepreneurship, and so on.

To do so, click the vertical ellipsis on the top-right corner of the Elective Subjects box and choose Add elective group:

The new block will be automatically named Group 2, with the original becoming Group 1:

As new groups of elective subjects are added, they're numbered sequentially for ease of identification. You can rename them, however. Find out how in the next topic.

To edit a group of elective subjects, just press the vertical ellipsis on the top-right corner of the group in question, and from the ensuing dropdown menu select Elective group settings, Rename elective group or Delete elective group:

Elective group settings lets you to put up restrictions on the number of elective subjects that students can register for, in case attendees are only supposed to take a certain number of electives from each group or meet a certain threshold:

Rename elective group lets you assign a new name to the group in order to accurately represent the area of interest that it's related to:

Lastly, Delete elective group does what it says – though not before requesting confirmation, which, once given, is irreversible:

By the way, you can never delete all groups of elective subjects, for at least one must remain.

While the study plan template is automatically generated by the system, subjects must be manually added in. Rest assured, the process is quite easy! 😌

1) Click Add study plan subject on the top-right corner of the template

2) Define the Basic subject details:

If the subject you intend to associate with the class doesn't yet exist in Full Fabric, you can cut two carrots with one knife by tapping Create new subject +. 🥕 This will replace the field Subject with two others:

3) Scroll down to the section Final grade average & total credits awarded and decide whether the course:

4) Finally, press Add subject on the bottom or top right-hand corners

To edit a subject after it's been created, just go to the main page of the study plan and click directly on the subject to open the editor:

To delete it, however, press the vertical ellipsis at the end of the row and then Delete study plan subject twice:

If you attempt to make amendments to a study plan from which academic transcripts have already been spawned (for instance, to change the number of credits of a subject), the following modal will be triggered:

Check No, do not update existing student transcripts if you want the edits to only take effect for future transcripts, or Yes, update all student transcripts if you want them to also have a retroactive effect.

Aside from the details pertaining to the subjects within the study plan, there are five template-wide settings that dictate global variables correlated with the class. To reach them, tap the gear at the top right-hand corner of the template:

Below you may find a description of each control:

Credits — Define the total number of credits required for graduation from the programme by clicking Edit, inputting the number and pressing Save changes:

Paths — Paths allow you to create multiple study plans for a class, each path consisting of a different study plan. They mainly come in handy for classes with more than one track (for instance, a "Marketing and Advertising" programme where, in the second year, you have to pick "Marketing" or "Advertising" to specialise in, and each study track has different subjects and thus courses). The Paths setting is what allows you to make that split. In turn, when you generate an individual student transcript, it will reflect whichever track you select at the time.

To create multiple paths, click Edit, tick Multiple paths, tap Add another + until you have as many lines as you need, input names for the paths, and click Save changes:

The paths will become separate tabs on the homepage of the study plan template:

Switch between them to view and customise the corresponding panels.

Transcript grade — Determine how the transcript grade is to be displayed to staff and students. Grade average is the default, but if you press Edit, you can change it to Grade percentage, whereby you'll be asked to define the Maximum transcript grade and the Maximum transcript grade decimal places; as always, click Save changes to finish.

Degree class — Designate the grade boundaries by which the final grade must be classified by mapping ranges of percentages to non-numeric values (such as letters and/or labels), the purpose of which is to establish a grading scheme. The degree class is displayed on academic transcripts and is automatically calculated based on the transcript grade average or the transcript grade percentage. Please note that, for the system to be able to run the math, the grading scheme for the courses mustn't be qualitative.

To create multiple degree classes, press Edit and then Add another + until you have as many lines as you need, insert each Degree class and respective Min and Max values, and tap Save changes:

Study plan subject categories — Create custom categories for your subjects, which can be allocated to them when defining their basic details. Classes may have various categories, while subjects can only have one per class – so imagine, for example, that you have a course that's shared between two classes: under those circumstances, the course is allowed to accumulate two different categories, one per class.

In short, categories give you the ability and flexibility to break down the subjects of a class into smaller groups of a diverse nature, such as by categorising them by the semester or term during which they are offered (First Semester, Second Semester and so on, or Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Summer 2022, etc.), or another criterion altogether. The point of this is to specify where in a transcript template you want a particular subject or group of subjects to appear through the use of dedicated substitution tags that only grab courses from a given category.

To create a new category or alter an existing one, push Edit, type a Name and allot a number of Credits to it:

To add more lines, click Add another +.

You can sort the subjects and courses within your school's study plans by subject name (A to Z), which is the default, and by course start date (January to December). If the latter is selected, subjects linked to multiple courses will be sorted by the earliest course start date. This affects applications, academic transcripts, transcript templates, enrollment plans and documents that use merge fields from enrollment plans or transcript templates.

This is an Admin-only feature, so get in touch with us to set your preferred sorting order and we'll gladly oblige! 😊

You have reached the end of this article. Thanks for reading! 🤓 If you have any questions or comments on the topic at hand, or if you enjoy reads like this and have article requests, let us know. Also, please leave a rating below. Your feedback is highly appreciated! 💖

PUBLISHED: July 1, 2021
​LAST UPDATED: February 27, 2024 at 8:40 a.m., by Cláudia Duarte