HESA Student Record 2008/09 - Course identifier
HESA Student Record 2008/09All fieldsCourse identifier | return to field list |
Short name | COURSEID | |||
Type | field | |||
Description |
This field records the institution's own unique internal identifier for the course. The Course identifier is the primary key for the Course entity and exists as a foreign key on Instance. | |||
Applicable to | England Northern Ireland Scotland Wales | |||
Coverage | All instances | |||
Base data type | COURSEIDType | |||
Field length | 30 | |||
Part of | ||||
Minimum occurrences | 1 | |||
Maximum occurrences | 1 | |||
Related fields | ||||
Reason required |
To facilitate linkage with the Instance entity. | |||
Notes |
Course identifiers will be allocated by the institution and should be unique for each course. The term 'course' in this context relates to the combination of subject and qualification that defines what a student is aiming for and which are described in fields Course.COURSEAIM and CourseSubject.SBJCA. The Course identifier links the course entity and the instance entity for the reporting period . There must be an entry in the course entity with a matching identifier in the instance entity to provide this link, and so give details about the student's study in the current year. Where a student changes course within an instance by changing either course aim (at the same level) or subject, the Course.COURSEID should be updated to reflect the course that is applicable at the end of the reporting period. Where the student continues on the same course, the same COURSEID should be kept for all years of the course. It is intended that in the future for some onward uses data from the student record should be aggregated to allow publication at a Course level. For the UNISTATS (TQI) site, for example, information about entrants, continuation, outcomes and destinations will be published together. If the COURSEID is not consistent throughout the course it will not be possible to compile a complete set of statistics as relating to a single course. Course.CTITLE will not allow for this aggregation: it is a text field and not suitable for the necessary validation. HESA has introduced a HIN validation warning when there is a HIN link but COURSEID changes. Year-on-year linking will continue by the HIN mechanism. Valid characters The valid characterset available for this field has been defined by a specific study undertaken as a part of the MIAP Common Data Definitions (CDD) project. The conclusions of this study were:
The character set chosen will support Welsh and Gaelic languages as well as all European and most other languages using a Latin-based character set. The Unicode charts that list each of the characters in this range can be found on the Unicode web site. The specific sets that are defined here are shown in the following PDF documents: XML files must be encoded with UTF-8 if they contain characters beyond the standard ASCII character set. Institutions are advised to specify the encoding used in their XML files (i.e. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>) and to ensure that their files are actually saved with that encoding. Files with an explicit encoding declaration other than UTF-8 will be rejected. Files with undeclared encoding will be assumed to be UTF-8. If encoding is not specified or does not match the actual file encoding, institutions are warned that there is a risk that data contained in the files may be changed on submission to HESA. | |||
Owner | HESA | |||
Version | 1.1 | |||
Date modified | 2009-07-30 | |||
Change management notes | Further detail provided for file encoding | |||
Business rules |
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Schema components |
Element: COURSEID
Data type: COURSEIDType |
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