Creating a University

[BeePee]

Dear all,

We plan to set up a forum for our hobby to share knowledge in form of a little University. We are still in the final stages of choosing the basic forum software but our tendency is to use vBulletin. We are not very knowledgeable about php so we turn to you for some help. We would like to use a maximum of existing features but would need a few add ons to fulfil our requirements:

As said before we plan to set up the board and structure it like a University with Students of various grades (not too many: 1 to 4 or 5), advanced grades such as Assistants and doctorants and various teacher grades such as Doctors, assistant Professors and Professors. -> For this we can use user groups.

We want to offer various subjects to subscribe for students, each led by at least one Professor. To some subjects there would be base subjects that have to be taken as well (i.e. you'll first have to learn how to read & write before you can study literature). There should be also a limit to the number of subjects a student can subscribe at once. -> most can be done with access rights.

Students while learning and accumulating knowledge should be able to get to the next level and at a certain level be able to subscribe to additional subjects. Their teachers giving them grades should resulting in an automatic upgrade. And that's where things are getting complicated: While the 'reputation system' gives some bases for grading we would need a per subject (= per forum) reputation system where the teachers can give grades. Once a certain number of points are achieved the student is auto-promoted to the next grade. As of a certain grade he's allowed to subscribe to the next subject.

We have no idea how complicated such a system would be and how much code already exists with the various mods available and thus would be very glad for your comments.

Thanks

P.S.: This is a pre-license-purchase question and your answers will be very helpful for our final choice. Thanks