The catalogue

Where the programs, courses and specialisations you send are defined

Every programCode, subject code and specialisation code you send is resolved against a catalogue your staff maintain. When a code you send is rejected, or credit lands against a course you did not expect, this is where the answer is.

What is in it

Screen	Holds
Programs	The programs applications can be made against, by code and year
Specialisations	Majors, minors and the rest, with their type
Courses	Individual subjects, with their credit points
Unspecified codes	The placeholders credit falls back on — “6 credit points at 100 level”
Intakes	The terms an application can name through `intakeCode`

All of it is editable in the portal: a course added there is immediately a course credit can be granted against, with no load or deploy in between. That matters when an agreement cites a subject the catalogue has not caught up with.

Years are separate

A program is identified by its code and its year, not by its code alone. The 2026 and 2027 editions of the same program are separate rows with their own curriculum, because what a program requires changes between years and credit granted under one does not describe the other.

This is why programCode and year name a program together, and why sending one without the other keeps the value you did not send. See Correcting records.

Course topics

Some courses are assessed in parts rather than as a whole. COMM1100 is Economics, Law and Management; a piece of prior study is assessed against one of those parts, not against the course entire.

A topic carries, alongside its name, the guidance an assessor uses to decide whether some external course covers it — example course titles that have qualified, what the outline has to contain, the words to look for, and the words that mean it does not qualify despite looking close. That guidance is prose written to be read, not a rule the system evaluates.

Where
A course’s Topics tab	the parts that course is assessed in, with their guidance
RPL → Topic Rule	every topic across every course, for when you know the topic and not which course owns it

Topics belong to a course and a year, like everything else in the catalogue, so the 2026 and 2027 editions of a course carry their own.

One external course routinely covers topics belonging to several different courses — a single economics unit might cover COMM1100-Economics, COMM1150-Economics and COMM1110-Ethics at once. That is why a topic is a record in its own right rather than a note on a course.

Nothing about this changes what you send. Topics are defined and assessed by the institution’s own staff, and the API’s application and outcome shapes are unaffected.

Loading rather than typing

For a whole year’s catalogue, the API is the way in — see Curriculum structures, which covers creating programs, their structures and their entries, and publishing them from DRAFT to LIVE.

The portal screens are for amendments: a course that was missed, a name that changed, a specialisation added late. Both write to the same catalogue.