Scope

Explanation of how the Ares "Current Semester" option chooses the appropriate semester in creating a course via the web service (LTI or building block/plugin).

Description

Ares will find the semester where the current date is within the semester’s start and end date. Since there may be multiple results within this date range, the results are ordered by the shortest number of days between the start date and end date of the course and by semester name. The first result is considered in the current semester.

Note! Blackboard uses the same web service; therefore, the current semester will be consistent in both Ares and Blackboard.

Examples

Given these semesters:

• If today’s date was 2014-12-01, Ares would consider “Fall 14 Quarter” the current semester because it has the shortest number of days.

Example 2

Given these semesters:

• If today's date was 2017-03-30, Ares would consider “Winter Tri 2” the current semester. While today’s date is between start/end for many of the records (Winter Semester, Winter Tri 2, Winter Half 1, Winter Tri 2 [DUP], Permanent 2, and Permanent 1), “Winter Tri 2” has the smallest number of days in it and is alphabetically sorted before “Winter Tri 2 [DUP]”.
• If today's date was 2017-05-11, Ares would consider "Winter Semester" the current semester. The only options where 2017-05-11 falls into is Winter Semester and Permanent. Winter Semester is a shorter time period than either of the Permanent semesters so it wins out.
• If today's date was 2017-05-15, Ares would consider "Permanent 1" the current semester. The only available options are Permanent 1 and Permanent 2. They both have the same number of days; therefore, Ares would then base the decision on alphabetical order. Permanent 1 would be the first selection in the alphanumerical order.