Feedback on Models setup

[Chris McComas]

I have a Course Management System I've developed here at work. Faculty
can login and upload lectures, course resources, etc to classes they
teach, along with general course information. Students can login to
view their courses, download lectures, resources, get announcements
from their faculty members, etc.

My model as is: http://dpaste.com/156737/

What I'm trying to figure out is the best method to assign students to
courses. We'd like the ability to have all students in one group,
there are a couple courses that are for all students regardless of
freshman, sophomore, etc. Also, we'd like to have groups for each
class year, Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior, also, we'd like the
option to individually add students to certain courses, so a freshman
could be added to a junior class. Also, we want the option to exclude
individuals from a course, so if all but 5 of the 80 freshman are in a
class, we can add the group to the class, but just exclude those five
(could do so with .exclude() in a query).

So would it make sense to have this in my Courses model?

- A ManyToManyField to groups that include All Students, Freshman,
Sophomores, Juniors, Seniors that will add all students in each group
to a course
- A ManyToManyField with a list of all students to individually add
these students to a course if they're Group is not already added
- A ManyToManyField with a list of all students to individually
EXCLUDE these students to a course if they're Group is added

[Sam Lai]

I'd just have one many-to-many field connecting students with courses.
Then in the admin interface, create views that allow adding entire
groups to a course, which would just loop through every student in a
group and add them to the course.

Splitting them up like you have (individual students, groups, students
to exclude from groups) might be more efficient in terms of storage,
but would probably result in more computation when retrieving data,
which is what your app will be doing most of the time.

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