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BAMS Planner User Guide

The BAMS Planner is a free tool for mapping your way through the UPOU Bachelor of Arts in Multimedia Studies. It keeps count of your units, lays your courses out term by term, and warns you when a course is not open to you yet. Open the planner.

Contents

  1. What this is
  2. Where your data lives
  3. The progress dashboard
  4. The course list
  5. Marking a course
  6. Planning by term
  7. Prerequisites
  8. Exporting your plan
  9. Where the curriculum comes from
  10. A typical first session

1 · What this is

The planner holds the full BAMS curriculum and lets you record where you are in it. Nothing is filled in for you; you start with every course unmarked and build the plan yourself.

This tool is unofficial. It is a planning aid, not an enrollment system, and not an official academic record. Make sure to have your Plan of Study (POS) checked by the program chair, or check it against the official BAMS curriculum before you act on it.

2 · Where your data lives

There is no account and no login. Everything you enter is stored in your own browser on the device you are using, and never leaves it.

Simply put, clearing your browsing data will erase your plan, and your plan will not follow you to another device or browser. If you have spent time on it, export a copy (see section 8).

3 · The progress dashboard

The panel at the top counts only courses you have marked Completed. It shows your total against the 142 units the degree requires, then a card per category so you can see which part of the curriculum is lagging.

PE and NSTP are grouped in a separate row underneath. They are required, but they do not count toward the 142 units, so they are tracked separately.

4 · The course list

Every course starts under No term assigned. As you give courses a term, they move up into their own group, and the list reads top-down in the order you intend to take them.

The courses are grouped by category — GE Core, Major Core, Production, and so on — and each heading shows how many of its courses you have accounted for, alongside the units the category requires.

Click a category heading to fold it away, and click it again to bring it back. Later on, when most of the list is history, Hide completed clears the passed courses out of the way. Both are just ways of looking at the list — nothing is deleted, the dashboard still counts everything, and an exported PDF always contains the whole plan.

The two dropdowns above the list narrow what you are looking at, by category or by status.

5 · Marking a course

Each course takes one of four states:

Elective courses have a ceiling. The GE electives count 9 units toward the degree and the major electives 15, so the planner will stop you marking more than the curriculum can credit.

6 · Planning by term

Terms are picked from a list, so the planner can tell which term comes first. Once you have assigned a term to a course, a Plan by term panel appears above the list showing each term's unit load. This is so you can easily catch whether you have underloaded or overloaded a term.

7 · Prerequisites

Prerequisites are labeled under the course title. A course can only be marked Planned once each prerequisite is either already passed, or planned in an earlier term — you cannot take a course and its prerequisite in the same term.

You can mark a course Completed or In progress as you go, without having to assign a term from the second drop-down. You may have already completed the course in a past term, or successfully credited it from a previous program, in which case you can easily add the course to your POS.

8 · Exporting your plan

Export CSV downloads every course with its status and term, ready to open in a spreadsheet. Export PDF opens your browser's print dialogue — choose Save as PDF as the destination to keep a copy of your POS. The printed version always comes out on white, whatever theme you are using.

9 · Where the curriculum comes from

Course codes, titles and units follow UPOU's published BAMS curriculum, and prerequisites come from the Faculty of Information & Communication Studies (FICS) site. The recommended ordering comes from the BAMS curriculum flowchart by Miguel Ferdinand C. Co, used with thanks. Where the two disagree, refer to the curriculum published on the UPOU website, and use the flowchart as a reference.

Curricula change. If you spot something out of date, kindly let me know.

10 · A typical first session

  1. Mark everything you have already passed as Completed. The dashboard fills in as you go.
  2. Mark what you are taking now as In progress.
  3. Give your next term a few Planned courses, checking the prerequisite lines as you choose.
  4. Glance at Plan by term to see whether your load per term is reasonable. Note that the regular academic load per term is 12 units.
  5. Export a PDF so you have a copy on your local device.
Open the BAMS Planner