The second part of this post will explain the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting in greater detail. Let’s start by briefly looking at online credit limits first (if you already use these, feel free to skip to the section below that describes the details for the online credit limit setting you use).

The basic idea behind online credit limits is pretty straightforward. Online credit limits provide one way to ensure that, if your institution has a research requirement component, you can divide up how much of the credit requirements can come from online studies.

Of course, different institutions implement credit requirements differently. That’s why Sona offers three different ways to implement online credit limits for your site:

• 1
  Online credit limits as a percentage of the total credit requirement
• 2
  Online credit limits as a fixed number or value (e.g., 15 credits)
• 3
  Online credit limits set on a course-by-course basis

Once students have met their participation credit requirements, there may no longer be any reason for the online credit limit. That’s where the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting comes in.

This setting allows you to set an online credit limit, then evaluates participants credit progress as they earn credits towards their credit requirements. When a participant meet their credit requirements, the setting effectively “disables” the online credit limit, allowing the participant to once again earn credit from online studies.

How the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting overrides the online credit limits depends partly on which of the three online credit limit setting options you use. The sections below each cover one of the three options, focusing on how that limit setting works works with the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting.

Here, we will provide a more detailed explanation of the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting when your site uses percent-based online credit limits. As is our tendency when it comes to such explanations, we’ll use an example. We don’t need many specifics here, but providing a few will help.

First, we need a Sona site. In particular, we need our example site to use online credit limits. Also, because the online credit here is percentage-based, we need a credit requirement total (well, technically we don’t need credit requirements, but we won’t be able to explain much about percent-based online credit limits without them).

Credit requirements are set on a per-course basis on your Course Listing page. In real life, the total credit requirements (where, again, “total credit” refers to credit from both online studies and lab studies, combined) may vary from participant to participant, because a participant’s credit requirement depends on the courses they are enrolled in. That’s more complicated than we either need or want for our example.

To simplify things, we’ll suppose that all participants in our hypothetical Sona site are enrolled in some section of the same course. This course has a credit requirement of 10, which means that all participants have a total credit requirement of 10.

Next, we need to set an online credit limit percentage, e.g., 30%. Because the total credit requirement is 10, the online credit limit is 30% of this total, i.e., 3 credits.

How does this limit work? When the participant earns 3 credits from online studies (or will earn, i.e., the credits are pending), the system stops them from signing up for more online studies:

With No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements disabled, that’s where things would end. With the setting enabled, the system still initially prevents the participant from signing up for more online studies after once they reach the 3 credit limit (please note that this limit includes pending credits!), but now the limit becomes more flexible. Once the participant meets the total credit requirement of 10, the system will allow them to exceed the 30% limit.

This does not mean the system will allow a participant to exceed the maximum total credits allowed. That’s a separate setting:

Please note that, once again, the “total” in “maximum total credits” refers to the combined number of credits earned from both online and lab studies.

Continuing with our example, we’ll now factor in example maximum total credit number of 20, depicted in the image immediately above. Once more, if the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting is enabled, then once a participant meets their credit requirement of 10 credits, the participant can then earn more than the maximum 3 credits allowed (in our example) from online studies. However, there is still a maximum total of 20. This maximum applies to both online and lab studies. Enabling the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting does not override this maximum. In our hypothetical example, the participant with 10 total credits, 3 of which are from online credits, can earn additional credits from online and lab studies until they hit the maximum of 20.

In short, No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements allows the participant to earn online credits beyond the maximum percentage, but only if the participant has met the total number of credits required. It also doesn’t affect the Maximum Total Credit setting (if enabled).

What happens when a participant has no credit requirement? In other words, suppose a participant has a credit requirement of 0, and the system is using the percentage option for the Maximum Online Credits setting.

That’s an interesting question (which is why we asked it both rhetorically and in such a leading manner)! There’s actually a separate setting for this, independent of the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting:

The above setting is relevant here because the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting works similarly when the total credit requirement is 0. That is, if the total credit requirement is 0, and the maximum percent of online credits is 30%, then the maximum number of online credits is…infinity? Well, whatever the theoretical maximum, it’s more related to physics than departmental or university policy. The system simply treats this as equivalent to having no online credit limit.

Fixed online credit limits are perhaps the most straightforward type. Unsurprisingly, then, how this setting works with the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting is likewise quite simple. Let’s jump right into an example.

Suppose a Sona site has a fixed online credit limit of 5 credits. It doesn’t matter whether a participant has a credit requirement of 1, 5, or 500, the online credit limit is the same across the board.

Now suppose a participant on this Sona site has a total credit requirement of 15 credits (keep in mind that the total credit requirement is set for each course, and thus can vary from participant to participant). Without the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting enabled, as soon as this participant earns 5 credits from online studies, the system prevents them from signing up for any more online studies:

With the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting enabled, things are more flexible. The system will look both at the number of online credits earned and the total number of credit required. If the participant has 5 credits from online studies, the system next looks to see if they have met their credit requirement (which, in this example, is 15 credits). If they haven’t, then the online credit limit works as it did before and the participant can’t sign up for more online studies.

However, if the participant has 15 credits (i.e., the participant has met the total credit requirement), then the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting “overrides” the online credit limit. The participant can exceed the online credit limit of 5, because they have met the total credit requirement of 15.

Fixed limits and percentage-based limits work with the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting in a similar manner. As with the percent-based limit, if the fixed online credit limit is 0, then the system treats this as no online credit limit at all.

Of the three online credit limit setting options, per-course online credit limits are perhaps the most…nuanced. The reason for this complexity nuance is directly related to the level of control this setting type gives you over how participants can earn and allocate credits.

Now is not the time (nor is this the place) to explain per-course online credit limits in detail. After all, we did that when we introduced them a few years earlier. You can read about the setting options here: Setting Online Credit Limits on a Course-by-Course Basis and read about how this limit type works in practice here: Running Studies with Course-level Online Credit Limits.

That said, it won’t hurt to provide a quick example specific to understanding the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting.

Imagine you have two courses, Course A and Course B. You have online credit limits enabled and are using the per-course setting. You could have one online credit limit for Course A and a different limit for Course B, but for simplicity let’s imagine both courses have the same requirements and limits:

If a participant is enrolled in both courses (and only these courses!), then technically you can say the participant’s online credit limit is 6. Really, though, they have a limit of 3 online credits for Course A, and a different limit of 3 online credits for Course B. This is important, particularly if we want to understand how per-course online credit limits work with the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting. Just as each course has a separate course credit requirement, so too does each course have an online credit limit when this setting is enabled.

Once a participant applies three credits from online studies towards Course A, they have reached a limit, but it’s a course limit. If the online credits earned for Course B are below 3, then the participant can continue to earn credits from online studies. Once the participant has met the online credit limit in both courses, however, the system will prevent them from participating in further online studies.

This is where the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting becomes relevant. The participant’s online credit limit has been reached. We now want to understand the flexibility conditions that need to be met for the participant to exceed these limits.

As might be expected when online limits are set on a per-course basis, the No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting likewise works on a per-course basis.

Let’s say a participant has earned 5 credits in Course A and 4 in Course B. This means they’ve met the credit requirement for Course A, but not the one for Course B. The No Online Credit Limit After Meeting Requirements setting will allow the participant to earn additional credits from online studies, but they can only apply them to Course A (at least until they meet Course B’s credit requirement).

The important takeaway here is that the “after meeting requirements” condition is evaluated on a per-course basis. This means that a participant can continue to earn credits from online studies providing that they’ve met the course requirement for at least one of the courses they are enrolled in.

To see why this can matter a great deal, imagine we add Course C into the mix. Course C is simple: it has no credit requirement. When the system evaluates whether a participant in Course C has met the credit requirement for this course, the answer will always be “yes”.

This may seem counterintuitive. After all, it means that a participant enrolled in a course with no requirement can always enroll in online studies. They start out having met the credit requirements for that course, and even if they can’t apply online credits towards other courses, the system will allow them to sign-up for online studies.

This is by design. Just because a course has no credit requirement doesn’t mean that participants can’t earn credit in that course. It just means that this is extra credit. A participant enrolled in a course with no credit requirement may be able to earn extra credit via online studies, but per-course online credit limits will prevent them from applying these credits towards courses that have a credit requirement and an online credit limit (at least until the credit requirement for that course is met).