I installed Gibbon recently and I am currently trying to test it to see if it fits our institute’s needs.
I looked for some information on how to setup our school’s structure in Gibbon but I couldn’t find any. This link : https://docs.gibbonedu.org/
was not very helpful. Some terms are defined but others are not. And the definition and explanations were not very clear to me.
So I’m a bit lost about where to start in order to set up my school, e.g student lists, classes, courses, etc.
Please help! Any link to any guide or docs to read or watch will be appreciated.
Documentation has never been our strongest point, but it is something we are keen to keep developing. The closest we have started to an overview of system concepts and terminology is our Getting Started guide:
Yes I have seen it and tried to follow the terminology there. But I guess I will have to go back there and try to setup my school slowly and I will ask here if there’s some issue that I cannot overcome. Thank you for your answer.
Yes I have seen it and tried to follow the terminology there. But I guess I will have to go back and try to setup my institute slowly while asking here if there’s some issue that I cannot overcome.
My first question :
Students in Gibbon are first grouped by age. I’m testing Gibbon for use in an English department in a university (because we want to have our own student management system). Do you think it’s ok if instead of year groups (which don’t make sense for our kind of use) I use the year groups to divide students based on the major/career/field they’re studying in at the university, e.g Business Administration students = 1st Year group, Legal studies = 2nd year groups, and so on.
Hi Monica, good question! For a universities I’ve helped in the past we’ve variously used Year Groups and Roll/Form Groups called “All” to hold all students, and then basically ignored those groupings going forward. You could do Year Group as all, and then Roll Group as the major. Generally we store subject selections (which could be used for both majors and minors) in Timetable Admin’s course and class structure. I hope this helps. Ross.
Hi Ross, Sandra, and others,
Your answer to Monica is useful information to us, too. We are a literacy organization in the USA that teaches adults. We dealt with the concept behind grouping and are doing much like Monica suggested, though if I had it to do over we would probably use your suggestion of “All”. My biggest questions now regard the workflow of entering students in the system manually. Having adult students, we wont use the parents’ functions, and family groupings are mostly useless. When we add a new person and select student as role, it doesn’t ask for address information. What is the best order to set up new students? Typically, they don’t go to the web site and apply, they simply register in person at the first class session for some courses and come for a registration appointment at our office prior to the beginning of class for other courses. THANKS for any advice you can give. I am working on a brief usage manual for the lady who will be entering most of the data, and will be willing to pass it along to you to incorporate in any way you like in your existing documentation if it might help others.
– Glenn
If you’re not using the application or parents functionality, then entering new students directly through the User Admin > Manage Users function is likely your best bet. There is also a public registration option, which could be an alternate route: the students could signup to Gibbon and create their own user, which is set to Pending Approval by default, and then an administrator receives a notification and approves it, then places them in their classes as needed. Check out the User Admin > Public Registration Settings for this option.