Key concepts

ABS Elevate uses a small set of words over and over. They are not everyday words, and the rest of this documentation assumes you know them. This page explains all of them, in the order they matter to you.

If you read only one page on this site, read this one.

Program

A program is a course of study that Africa Business School offers — an executive master's, a certificate, a corporate programme. It is the name on your diploma, not the thing you register for.

A program holds one or more cohorts. On its own it has no dates and no participants.

Cohort

A cohort is one intake of a program. It runs between a start date and an end date, and it is the thing you are actually part of.

Two people can be on the same program and never meet, because they are in different cohorts. Everything else on this page — the catalog, your credits, the registration windows — belongs to a cohort, not to the program above it.

A cohort appears under My Programs only while it is running, and only once a program officer has added you to it. If My Programs is empty you will see "You aren't enrolled in any program yet" — that means no cohort you belong to is currently running, not that something is broken.

Each cohort is also marked Public or Private — a setting only program staff see, on an administration screen. It affects how people are added to the cohort; in practice a program officer adds you.

Catalog

The Catalog is the set of courses available inside your cohort. It is where you browse, filter and read about a course before deciding you want it.

A cohort's catalog is displayed one of two ways, and the choice is made by the program officers when the cohort is set up:

• as a flat list of individual courses, or
• grouped into modules, so you first pick a module and then look at the courses inside it.

Both show the same courses. Only the grouping differs.

Each course in the catalog shows its cost, its difficulty, the skills it covers, and its offerings — the actual scheduled runs of that course, each with its own dates and location. A course with nothing scheduled shows "No Offerings available at the moment!".

Credits

Every learner in a cohort is given a budget of credits for that cohort. Each course costs credits. When you take a course, its cost comes out of your budget, and what is left is what you can still spend.

Your remaining budget is shown as a sentence of the form "You have 8/20 credits remaining".

Registration window

A registration window is a period during which you choose courses. It has an opening date and a closing date, and outside those dates you cannot make or change your choices.

While a window is open, its own page shows the closing date as Deadline followed by the date. A cohort that has a single registration window also carries it on its card under My Programs — "Registration window open until Jun 12, 2026".

Outside those dates ABS Elevate tells you so where you would have acted, rather than in a banner. Before the window opens, Add to Shortlist on a course page is greyed out and the tooltip explains why: "The registration hasn't opened yet". After it closes, the same button reads "Deadline exceeded, course cannot be added to shortlist", and your shortlist page turns read-only under "Deadline execeeded. You can't edit your shortlist anymore after " and the closing date and time.

A cohort can have several registration windows, one after another — a cohort that runs for two years might open a window each term. Each one has its own dates, its own list of courses, and its own rules. Your credit budget, however, belongs to the cohort as a whole and is spent down across all of its windows.

Allocating credits

Before you can choose anything, you have to decide how much of your budget you want to spend in this particular window. That is what "Allocate Credits" means.

The platform explains it this way: "You can choose the number of days you want to allocate to this registration window. you can always modify this value before the deadline."

This trips up almost everyone the first time. Two things to hold on to:

• Allocating is not spending. You are setting a ceiling for this window, not buying anything.
• If you allocate too little, you will not be able to add the courses you want. Trying to add a course that costs more than you allocated gives you "Not enough credits" — "You haven't allocated enough credits to shortlist this course".

You can change the amount you allocated at any time before the window closes, as long as you are not already holding courses that cost more than the new figure.

Shortlist

Your shortlist is the list of courses you want from this window, ranked in order of preference. You add courses to it from inside the registration window — open a course there and choose "Add to Shortlist" — and then you put them in order, most wanted first, using "Move up" and "Move down".

Where you press that button matters more than it looks. The Catalog has a button carrying exactly the same label, and it writes to a different list — Your Offerings, which is unranked and spends no credits. Only the registration window's version of a course page adds to the shortlist described here.

The ranking is not decoration. It is the single most important thing you do in a registration window, because it is what the program officers work from. The platform says so on the shortlist screen itself, under "Course Choices":

Program officers will use the ranking of your choices to schedule courses, and they will do their best to schedule the courses that are most important to you. You can modify this ranking until the deadline of the current registration window.

It also encourages you to be generous with the list: "We encourage to select as many courses as possible." A longer, honestly ranked list gives you a better outcome than a short cautious one, because allocation works all the way down your list, in your order, for as long as your allocated credits last. It does not stop at the first course it cannot give you — a cheaper course further down can still be granted after a more expensive one above it was not. What runs out is credits, not attempts.

You do not submit your shortlist. It is submitted for you when the window closes — "Your choices will be automatically submitted on", followed by the closing date and time.

The full mechanics are in Shortlist and credits.

Scheduling conflicts

Two courses whose sessions — the individual meetings that make up an offering — overlap in time cannot both be on your shortlist. If you try, the platform stops you with a dialog headed "You already have a course at this time", which names the course already on your list that is in the way. That dialog is one of the corners of ABS Elevate that was never translated, so it reads in English whichever language you use.

To take the second course, remove the first from your shortlist and then add it.

This is a genuine restriction, not a warning you can click past. It exists because you cannot be in two rooms at once, and the program officers should not have to discover that for you.

Mandatory minimums

Some courses are marked "Mandatory Course". A window may attach a minimum spend to them — a number of credits you are expected to put into mandatory courses in that window.

There are two versions of this, and the difference is in the wording:

• Recommended — "For this period, we recommend spending at least 3 credits on mandatory courses".
• Enforced — "For this period, you must spend at least 3 credits on mandatory courses".

Read that wording carefully. "We recommend" and "you must" are two different sentences on what is otherwise the same screen, and the second is an instruction from the program office rather than a suggestion.

What the platform itself does with the two is the same: it shows you the sentence and counts your spending against the figure. It does not currently stop you building a shortlist or letting it be submitted when you are under the minimum, even an enforced one. So treat an enforced minimum as a requirement you are answerable to, not as a limit the screen will apply on your behalf.

Main list and waiting list

When a registration window closes, the program officers work out who gets which course. For each course you shortlisted, you end up in one of two places: the main list, which means you have a place, or the waiting list, which means you do not yet.

You will not read that off a screen of your own. ABS Elevate shows you no status beside your own name: after the deadline your shortlist page still shows what you asked for, in the order you asked for it, and nothing about what you got.

The four words — "In Main List", "In Waiting List", "Registered" and "Removed" — belong to the program office's screens. They are the vocabulary staff will use when they talk to you about your outcome, which is why they are worth knowing. What reaches you is a confirmation message listing which of your choices came through, and the courses themselves appearing among your own.

Here is the part people get wrong. This is not first come, first served. Being quick does not help you.

The allocation goes through your shortlist, in the order you ranked it, spending the credits you allocated to that window: each course you can still afford when it is reached puts you on the main list for it, and any course costing more than you have left goes to the waiting list — either way the walk carries on down the list. What runs out is credits, not attempts.

Capacity then does its own work, and it is not a footnote. A course whose main list has come out longer than the number of places it has gives places back, and the choice moved to the waiting list is the most recently added one — that, and only that, is where arrival time separates two learners who are otherwise tied. Anyone moved out gets those credits back, and the courses still on their own waiting list are tried again in their own order, so losing a full course often converts into a place on something further down. A course can also have a minimum, below which it may simply not be run.

Program officers then review what all of that produced and can adjust it by hand, because balance and individual circumstances are things a person judges, not a calculation. The lists exist and shift while the window is still open — that is how the platform can tell you a course is already full — but nothing is settled until a program officer confirms the course.

What follows from that: rank honestly. Putting a course you care about below one you do not, in the hope of gaming the order, works against you.

Main list and waiting list covers all of this in detail — including how you find out where you ended up, and what to do if you land on a waiting list.

Wishlist

The wishlist is a different feature from the shortlist, and the two are easy to confuse.

Your shortlist is for courses you are registering for, now, in an open window. Your wishlist is for a course you want the school to know you want — later, or instead, or whenever it is next run. It takes no credits, gives you no place and registers you for nothing.

Whether a course can be wishlisted at all is decided course by course by the program office, and it has nothing to do with whether anything is scheduled. Where they have allowed it the button is there; where they have not, there is none. So a course with offerings running right now can still be wishlisted — that says "not this time, but keep me in mind" — while a course with nothing scheduled will offer you no button if interest has been switched off for it.

On the course's page you use "Express Interest". The course is added to your wishlist, your interest is counted alongside everyone else's, and if "Notify me about new offerings" is on, ABS Elevate tells you the moment an offering opens. Program officers see those counts and use them to decide what to schedule next.

A wishlist entry costs you nothing and commits you to nothing. When the course you asked for is finally scheduled, your interest is marked as fulfilled, and registering for it is a separate, normal act in the next registration window.

Wishlist explains how to manage yours.

Where to go next

• If you are a learner, continue with For learners.
• If you run programs, continue with For administrators.
• Every term on this page also has a short entry in the Glossary.