How do I perform a teaching data roll over?

There are two ways to create teaching activity templates for the upcoming academic year:

1. Create all (or some) templates from scratch. This is useful if the modules’ delivery changes significantly compared to the current academic year.
2. Roll over all (or some) templates from the current year. The roll over tool copies the existing templates into the next year, giving you a basis to work with. This is useful if the majority of the teaching requirements remain the same.

The most common scenario is when most of the modules remain the same – in this case a departmental timetable officer will roll over most of the modules and omit the others.

To access the roll over go to myadmin.aber.ac.uk, press the Teaching Data Collection tile and then choose the Roll Over menu item on the left:

The roll over process is normally available from the beginning of March until the end of May, however the Timetable Office can limit this for practical reasons. If you visit the roll over page when it’s not available, you will see a message that will inform you of it.

The Timetable Office can open the roll over page on request, so please contact them if you plan to do your roll over significantly earlier or later to make sure that it can be accommodated.

If the roll over is available, then you will see a list of modules available to you for rolling over:

Rolling over is performed on a module basis, and rolling over a module will copy across any templates that are contained within it.

You will only be able to roll over the modules that don't have any templated in the target year (which would only be the case if you have manually created them). If the roll over tool finds templates contained within target module, it will skip it, therefore retaining the templates that are there already.

Before proceeding, please carry out the following checks:

• Check the Mapping Key column to ensure that it is correct. The keys can have three values:
  • The most common, “OK – exact module match found”. This indicates that there is a module with the same code and running in the same semester next year
  • “OK – module match found in a different semester”. This indicates that the semester in which the module is delivered will be different next year. Most of the times it will appear against modules that have either been discontinued or brought back after not running.
  • A third option will indicate if more than one target module exists. Although the system will offer you an option to bypass it, it is strongly recommended that you contact the Timetable Office before proceeding to ensure that data is transferred correctly if you see anything other than “OK” in this column . This occurs very rarely, and normally indicates that a module was recorded on the system with an incorrect semester and then subsequently corrected.
• Verify the templates that are being rolled over by pressing the ‘View Source Module Activities’ button
• If the module isn’t running next year, you may want to untick the box next to it to skip it. You may want to roll over these modules if you want to retain the templates until the next time it runs.
• Custom Mappings column will highlight any suggested week changes. This will only apply to the templates with “Custom” week pattern. Normally this will only be used when the Easter break weeks move. In 2023-24 the teaching weeks will remain the same as they are in 2022-23, therefore you will not encounter this option until later years.
• Untick any modules that you do not want to roll over (e.g., if the module delivery changed significantly)

Once you are happy with your selection you need to confirm this by ticking the “I have checked this table of modules are satisfied the modules and activities are correct and can be rolled over.“ checkbox below the list of modules:

You may now perform the roll over by clicking the ‘Rollover Selected Modules’ button. Please only click once and allow up to 30 seconds for the page to automatically refresh:

You will receive an automatic e-mail log from the system informing you which templates have been rolled over.

It is worth knowing that the parent and children module are rolled over independently of each other – especially if they belong to different departments. This means that if you roll over a parent it will appear without its children in the upcoming year until the children modules are rolled over.

Likewise, if you roll over the child modules first, they will appear blank until the parent module is rolled over.

Once both parent and child modules have been rolled over, the system will automatically link them together; until then the child templates will remain in a pending state: they will disappear from the list of modules available for roll over, but won’t appear in the next academic year’s data.

The e-mail log that you receive will be indicative of this.

To minimise the chance of data mismatch, it is therefore recommended that you roll over parent and children modules within a very short timeframe. This is especially important if the parent and child modules are being delivered by different departments – in this case it is recommended that a person who rolls over one module contacts their colleague in another department to ensure they both roll over their respective modules roughly at the same time or that they agree not to amend the templates until both modules have been rolled over.