General Preferences

Initial Setup

After you have successfully connected onCourse to onCourse Server for the first time, you will see is the General preferences window, opened to the Service tab. The other tabs will govern other behaviours within onCourse such printing reports, being able to send emails, backups. You’ll mostly be able to ignore the majority of these settings to begin with.

General Preferences

Navigate here by clicking on “File” -> “Preferences” -> “General” from the top menu.
The first thing you will be asked to do is name your College, this is the only essential part of all the preferences that needs be set in order to run onCourse.

Services Tab

General Preferences – Services

These fields control the additional services that ish provides for onCourse.

These are not be enabled by default and all options are can safely be ignored for all those people who are not using our additional services in onCourse. onCourse is still fully functional as an enrolment system without these services.

If you are using any additional services, then we will supply you with a user name and password to access the services. More info

Messaging Tab

In order to successfully send email messages to students and tutors you will need to correctly configure these settings.

You will need a hostname or IP address of the mail server. You will also need a valid email account that will be accepted by that mail server, put this is the “Email from” address. The System Administrator is the address that will appear on the email itself, you should contact your mail administrator to verify these details.

If you wish to process bounced emails you’ll need to have a separate POP3 account on a mail server that’s set to collect bounced emails, that’s only used for this process. See here for more details concerning bounced emails.

In the SMS field, this is what the receivers of your SMS messages will see as the sender details. Put in a mobile number for people to reply to or, if you do not have an inbound SMS number, you can input the name of your organisation.

LDAP Authentication Tab

This tab is used to set users to be authenticated by either LDAP or AD. For most organisation this setting can be safely ignored. Contact us if you need help on setting this up.

Message Templates Tab

These are templates that are sent for various events such as student enrolment confirmation, tutor reminders, payment failure and payment success as well as few others. You can edit the template to your liking with the help of our trusty pop up menu for more options.

Maintenance Tab

Control how often and where your data is backed up. You’ll start seeing onCourseBackup_00XXX.zip files. Restoring is as simple as stopping onCourse Server, unzipping onCourseBackup_00XXX.zip and replacing your current onCourse.iocdata directory.

AVETMISS Tab

These are your organisations details that will be used for all AVETMISS exports. Enter your NTIS id in the field ‘Identifier’. You can also choose to limit your staff to creating courses only from pre-approved units and qualifications that you mark within onCourse as ‘offered’. To use this feature, flag those you are approved to deliver in the qualifications and module/units table.

Printing Tab

The various reports that can be printed by onCourse are enabled/disabled within this interface, and also allows the addition of custom reports.