The Courses Database

One of our major roles is to provide centralised facilities to schools and departments throughout the university. Examples of this include:

• A customisable course database, providing search facilities for every schools.
• Confirmation and Clearing web-based services.

Obviously we rely heavily on advice, support and development from the Information Services (IS) team for this technology. If you need us to help you with any of these services for your site, you need to give us as much time as possible to schedule development time with IS.

The Course Database

The new course database was recently rolled out by Information Services. Whilst this offers a central source of course information, it has also been designed to allow all schools the ability to offer their own customisable search pages for their individual sites.

e.g. http://www.brighton.ac.uk/set/courses/

Our medium term aim is to improve the interface and then implement this on every school site across the university.

There are numerous advantages to this approach.

• You don't need to update your website pages when your course data changes.
• All information is held centrally and maintained by Registry. Your course information should never fall out of date.
• Your site can benefit from a sophisticated search interface, branded with your own site's look-and-feel, without requiring any sophisticated programming expertise.

Any errors within your course data should be brought to the attention of course-data@brighton.ac.uk

Implementing the Courses database on your site

You have two options to access the database information on your site.

1. You can link to the courses database on the central pages site by using the following URL
   http://courses.brighton.ac.uk
   
2. You can link to the courses database using a template of your school's own design, such as:
   http://www.brighton.ac.uk/set/courses/
   
   To do this, you will need to provide us with a design template and will need to make minor changes to your code. Contact us for more information.
   

Linking to a specific course

In addition, you can link to specific courses in the database, using either your own look and feel, or the central site design. For example, to link to the BSc Hons in Architectural Technology (course number 170), you would use the following:

http://courses.brighton.ac.uk/course.php?cnum=170

To link to the BSc Hons in Architectural Technology using the Environment design template, you would use the following:

http://www.brighton.ac.uk/set/courses/undergraduate/building/architectural_technology.php?PageId=170

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• The dynamic page reference is appended with ?num= and the individual course number.
• We can provide the list of course numbers so you can make amendments.

You can see a great example of these direct links at: http://www.brighton.ac.uk/set/courses/undergraduate/