News & Updates

Automatically Close Classes

By Paolo Dona — Jul 12, 2011

For a long time NiftySchool had the concept of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ classes.

We had an internal flag that marked classes as ‘closed’ (meaning they were no longer taught), and you could close and reopen them at will.

Over time we discovered this was quite counterintuitive and generated conflicts with the class dates.

For example, how should the system treat a class which ends next month, but has been marked as closed? If it is no longer being taught, shouldn’t its end date be updated accordingly?

We just released an update so that you no longer need to manually close classes. They will be automatically considered open or closed based on their end date.

This means all past classes are automatically considered closed.

To close a class you now just need to set its end date in the past.

This is how the system behaves now:

1. End date not set: class is open
2. End date in the future: class is open
3. End date past: class is closed

You can still see your past classes clicking on the ‘in the past’ link on the top right corner of you class list:

This change brings a number of benefits:

• less ambiguity on the class status
• you no longer need to close classes manually
• old classes are moved to the ‘past’ section automatically
• classes are reopened automatically if you extend the end date

We believe this reduces the amount of maintenance you need to do on your data, and helps keeping the system more consistent.

It is especially useful if you have a high number of private demo classes, as you don’t need to close each one of them individually.

Only one last note: if you had old closed classes without an end date set, they may now pop up into your active class list.
Just set their end date in the past (e.g.: last week) to move them back to the archive.

Not to worry, all data about closed classes will be preserved and you can still go ‘back in time’ with the timetable and see all of your stored information, such as attendance, hours taught per teacher etc.