Understanding Student Activity Guides

The PeopleTools Activity Guides feature is the basis of the Activity Guides feature in Campus Solutions. The Student Activity Guides feature enables you to define guided tasks for students to complete. Students are presented with a list of action items that need to be completed to finish a task.

The Student Activity Guides provide sample activity guide templates that incorporate existing student self-service pages and some configurable pages. This enables institutions to assign templates to students as tasks, which students can complete using the Student Task WorkCenter in classic self service or the Tasks tile in Fluid self service. In addition to the delivered templates and the Student Task WorkCenter page, Campus Solutions provides components to enable the configuration and assignment of these tasks. You can access these configuration and assignment components from the Task Management WorkCenter.

For information about activity guide template, activity guide instance, action item, activity guide pagelets, and context data as well as an overview of how to develop and deploy activity guides, see Enterprise Components: Understanding the Activity Guide Composer and the product documentation for PeopleTools: Portal Technology, “Developing and Deploying Activity Guides.”

The PeopleTools Activity Guide feature enables you to create a multi-step guided task. You create this task by defining an activity guide template and plugging-in existing pages (either delivered or customized) as action items in a specified sequence.

Each action item can have a start date/time and due date/time and has a status value (for example, Assigned, In Progress, and Completed). You can define:

• The dependencies between action items, for example, action item A must be completed before a student starts action item B.

• Whether an action item is required or optional, that is, whether the action item must be completed in order to complete the task.

• The processing that the system should perform when a student completes an action item.

For more information on action items, see Enterprise Components: AG Composer Categories - Actions Page and the product documentation for PeopleTools: Applications User's Guide, Using PeopleSoft Application Pages, “Using Activity Guides.”

You can define the context data for a template. The context data key fields are the unique key fields used to identify an activity guide instance (task). This can be as simple as just an EMPLID and Institution, or can include multiple fields (for example, Institution, EMPLID, Career, Career Number, Term and so on). Context data key fields must always include the two fields: Institution and EMPLID. The system populates the context data key fields when the template is assigned – manually or through the Assign Tasks process – to the student as an activity guide instance. In other words, an activity guide instance is the task that the student should complete.

Important:

Throughout this documentation, the terms activity guide instance, instance and task are synonymous and are used interchangeably.

Each task has an overall status (In Progress, Completed or Cancelled), a Start and Due Date, and an Active flag. If the Start and Due Date are not defined for the task then, the start date of the first action item is the task start date and the due date of the last action item is the task due date.