Cohorts in iGradePlus 12

Applies to the Enterprise SIS only — not the free gradebook, which already gets what Cohorts provide.

School Systems, Campuses, Schools, and Cohorts introduced Cohorts as one of the two genuinely new pieces of the version 12 structural model. This post is about what a Cohort will actually be, and what a school will be able to do with one.

A Cohort will be a group of students who start together, move through a set of classes together, and finish together — on their own schedule, rather than on the school year the rest of the institution runs. In version 12, a school will be able to organize itself that way.

How it works today

Every school in iGradePlus organizes its classes around the school year. A class belongs to a school and to that year, and that arrangement is what the gradebook, the grading, and the reporting all run on. For a K–12 school, and for most of higher education, it is exactly the right shape.

Here is where it reaches its limits.

A group of students isn’t something you can name. A school’s classes sit together in one set for the year; there is no level between the school and its classes. Twenty students taking the same four classes and finishing in November are visible if you read down the class rosters, but the group itself isn’t something iGradePlus holds — so it isn’t something you can schedule, configure, or report on as a unit.

Every group runs on the school’s calendar. One school year is active at a time, so an intake that starts in March and one that starts in September are both described inside that single year, sharing its start, its end, and its grading periods.

Group size and intake dates live outside the system. There is no capacity on a class and no window during which students may join one, so a rule like “this group takes twenty students, and enrollment closes two weeks after it starts” is kept in somebody’s head or a spreadsheet rather than in iGradePlus.

None of these are defects. They follow from a design built around the school year, which is the shape nearly every school runs on — and which version 12 keeps as its default.

What will change in iGradePlus 12

A school will choose how it is organized. Most will keep organizing around the school year, exactly as they do now. Schools whose programs don’t fit a year will organize into Cohorts instead.

School
  ├── Traditional     ← classes are organized around the school year  (default)
  └── Cohort-based    ← classes are organized into Cohorts            (NEW)
        ├── Spring Intake Cohort   ← its own calendar, classes, and students
        └── Fall Intake Cohort     ← running alongside it, on its own calendar

One point of vocabulary, carried over from the structural model: a Cohort is the group of students. The calendar it moves through is a Cohort Timeline — a separate thing, and a kind of Timeline in the same way a School Year is. The group and the schedule are deliberately kept apart, and this post is about the group.

Two ways a school can be organized

Each school in your system will carry a class model, and it will be one or the other — never both at once.

Traditional will be the default, and a traditional school will never encounter a cohort: the concept simply won’t appear. Cohorts will become visible only when a school is set up to use them.

The two models will be exclusive because every question the system answers about a student’s classes — which classes they are in, which calendar those classes follow, which grading options apply to them — needs a single answer, and a school running both ways at once would have two.

An institution that genuinely runs both will run two Schools. A career and technical center with a traditional day program and an evening adult-education program will be two schools under one campus: they serve different student populations on different calendars, which is precisely what a School distinguishes. Because version 12 keeps student and guardian records at the School System level, and people join a school through a membership record, describing your institution as two schools will not divide your student information — a student can belong to more than one school where that applies.

A school will be able to change its model, but not casually: while classes are already organized one way, iGradePlus will decline the change and name exactly what has to be moved first, rather than quietly reorganizing work you have already done.

What a Cohort will carry

• Its own identity — a name, a code, and a description, so the group will be something you refer to by name rather than by describing who is in it
• Its own classes — the set of classes the group moves through together
• Its own calendar — a Cohort Timeline, with its own dates and its own grading periods
• How many students it takes — a minimum and a maximum size
• When students can join — a window with an opening and a closing date, and whether a student may still be enrolled after it closes
• Its own grading options — covered further down

Those last two are worth pausing on, because they are the part of running a cohort program that has had to live outside iGradePlus. A cohort that takes eighteen students and closes enrollment on March 5 will describe that in the cohort itself, so the rule lives where the group does.

Cohorts running side by side

The reason a cohort carries its own calendar is that cohorts overlap. A group that starts in March and finishes in November is halfway through when the September group begins, and both are running when the traditional school year would be starting its second quarter.

In version 12, each cohort will carry the calendar it actually runs on, and several will be able to be active in the same school at the same time.

A gradebook for each cohort

In the Enterprise SIS, a teacher has a gradebook for each school they teach at, in each school year. It is where that teacher’s classes, assignments, and grading live for that school and that year.

In a cohort-based school, the gradebook will follow the cohort instead. A teacher working with the March intake and the September intake will have one for each, carrying that cohort’s classes and running on that cohort’s calendar — so two groups that overlap in time stay separate rather than being interleaved in a single year’s gradebook.

In a traditional school, nothing changes here: the gradebook follows the school and its year, as it does today.

A Cohort will be a settings level of its own

In version 12, grading options will be set at a level and inherited downward, and a Cohort will be one of those levels:

System  →  Campus  →  School  →  Cohort  →  Gradebook  →  Class

A cohort will inherit its grade scales, assignment categories, assignment statuses, category and assignment weights, drop-score policies, and course levels from the school above it — and will be able to take ownership of any of them where the program genuinely differs. An adult-education cohort graded on pass/fail will be able to hold its own grading scale while every other cohort in the school keeps the school’s, and nothing that didn’t change has to be entered twice.

This is the same set-once-and-inherit arrangement that runs through the rest of version 12 — the Scoped Options feature — with the cohort taking its place in the chain between the school and the classes inside it.

Cohorts and the free gradebook

Cohorts will belong to the Enterprise SIS, because they allow a school to run multiple, overlapping timelines. The free gradebook will not use Cohorts, and it will not use Cohort Timelines, because gradebooks already act as cohorts.

A gradebook is the top of your structure, your classes sit directly beneath it, and it carries its own calendar rather than sharing a school’s. That calendar can be a single term with one start date and one end date — the shape a group that starts together and finishes together needs. Running several groups at once is a matter of running several gradebooks, each on its own calendar, which the free version already allows. What a Cohort adds is the same thing inside one school, where the classes belong to the school rather than to a teacher.

What this will mean for you

• If you run a traditional school, nothing will change. Traditional will be the default class model, there will be no cohorts to set up, and the concept will stay out of your way entirely.
• If you run continuous-enrollment programs — career and technical training, adult education, certificate tracks, bootcamps — the group will become a real part of your institution: named, sized, with its own intake window, its own classes, its own calendar, and its own grading options.
• If you run both kinds of program, they will be two schools under one campus, sharing one set of student and guardian records rather than being forced into a single arrangement that suits neither.
• If you run a district, the class model will be each school’s own choice. A district will be able to hold traditional high schools and a cohort-based CTE center side by side, under one system, on one set of policies.