News & Updates

How To Manage Complex Schedules & Class Timetables

By Paolo Dona — Sep 01, 2011

During a recent data import for one of our customers, we noticed how laborious it can get to manage a complex weekly timetable.

NiftySchool is straightforward, for example, if you have always the same teacher teaching a course, with the occasional substitution.

You can quickly set that up as a ‘default teacher’ for the course, and every lesson in the timetable will have that teacher assigned by default.

You can assign a default teacher for each course you create.

What if you do have a regular schedule, but not a default teacher?

For example a class taught twice a week, on Mondays by teacher Scott and on Thursdays by teacher Angelica?

The Problem:

There is no way in NiftySchool to set up multiple default teachers for the class, based on the day of the week in which the lesson is taking place.

Luckily, you can customize the teacher assigned to each individual lesson in the timetable, but we cannot ‘infer’ more than one default teacher.

From the timetable, click on a lesson and change the teacher assigned.

This is flexible enough for most scenarios, but it raises another issue.

If the group class, taught by Scott on Mondays and Angelica on Thursdays, lasts for a few months, you will be forced to manually assign all of the appropriate lessons week by week:

1) Click on the Monday’s lesson, select Scott
2) Click on the Thursday’s lesson, select Angelica

This is repetitive work that we would like to avoid.

The Solution:

There is a quick way to copy the teachers assigned to lessons from the previous week’s timetable to the same lessons on the current week.

This means that once you configured this week’s timetable correctly, you can ‘replicate’ the same configuration with a single click.

In order to do this, you need to browse to the timetable and click on the “assign teachers as per last week” link.

For each lesson in the current timetable, the system will look up the same lesson in the previous week and copy its teacher configuration over.

Once this is done, the system will report how many lessons have been updated and will highlight them for you to review.

We hope this speeds up your weekly timetabling, and makes it a bit less tedious! Enjoy!!!