News & Updates

How To Handle Flexible Private Lessons

By Paolo Dona — Jul 07, 2011

In the past few weeks we started updating NiftySchool to better support one-to-one classes.

In particular we’re making changes so that you can manage private lessons that do not follow a fixed schedule.

Introducing private classes without fixed schedule:

When creating a new private class you will be now able to choose between creating a fixed schedule (eg: every Monday and Wednesday) or no schedule at all:

Let’s see what these two scheduling options do:

1) “Add lessons for each of the following days of the week”:

This option will set up one lesson for each day of the week between start and end date.

If you select, for example, ‘Monday’ between the 1st of August and 1st of September, you will end up with five lessons predefined in your timetable.

This works like recurring events in Outlook or Google calendar, it is a quick way to set up multiple lessons at once.

2) “I will add lessons manually later”:

This means that your class has no fixed schedule. The system will not preset any lessons in the timetable, and you will need to add them one by one from the register.

This is useful if you have casual students that book lessons whenever they can, but are not attending regularly.

For such students you can create an empty class, e.g.: "Paolo’s private lessons’, and add lessons as they happen.

Remember that all lessons can be canceled and rescheduled individually later – even if created by a fixed weekly schedule.

If you have a class which is taught ‘almost’ every Monday, for example, you’re still better off creating a weekly schedule and canceling the Mondays in which the lesson doesn’t take place.

New private class register:

Daily or weekly registers do not make sense for one-to-one classes as they have on average one or two lessons per week.

We changed the private class register to show all of the lessons taken by the student:

With this is easy to see how many lessons have been done, when they took place, and what topic was covered, all in a single screen.

This register can be printed and used to make the student sign their presence:

Your school’s logo will automatically appear at the top, and your contact details at the bottom of each page, so that this can also be used as attendance and progress report for your student, or your business client.

Topics covered and hours attended can be entered from the ‘Edit attendaces’ page to keep the register up to date, and printed again.

How do I add ‘unscheduled’ lessons?

Click on the new ‘Add lesson’ button on the right hand side of your register and you will be presented with this popup window:

Pick date/time/duration and save to update your register.

You can then add as many lessons as you want without any schedule restriction.

Similarly, you can click on the date of a lesson in the register to cancel it/reschedule it/assign new teacher etc.

These features should allow you to keep private lessons more organized and under control.

I hope you enjoy the new changes!