Matching Gibbon and my language school: help!

General
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Hello, guys!

I have been trying to set Gibbon for the language center I work in. I’m having some trouble understanding how to fit our reality into Gibbon, so I’ll try to briefly explain how we organize things here and if anyone has any idea on how to match these with Gibbon I’d be super grateful!

So, we teach a few languages here. Each language has its own set of courses, which may be divided either by the student’s age (kids, teens, adults) or purpose of study (exam preparation, general language course). Within each course (Kids, for example) there are levels (Kids 1 to 4), and each level has several groups, where students actually meet on a weekly basis, and they may choose which one they want to enroll in according to their availability. They don’t change from one group to another during the semester (it rarely happens, always through admin, never by themselves).

All students must enroll before each semester begins (or, exceptionally, during the first week of classes). Some of them (considering each course/level requirements) may choose to enroll in 2 courses from the same language (not in different levels within the same course), or from different languages (Spanish and French, for instance).

Each group lasts one semester (I’ve already got that down!) and students need to re-enroll themselves before the next semester begins. When this happens, they may choose another group in the next level, not necessarily the same one they were previously in.

Teachers may teach different groups within the same language, and they take attendance in each group’s class, which happens once a week.

Based on the structure we have in our school (Languages > Courses > Levels > Groups), what would the following Gibbon settings be? Would you suggest any way of making this equivalency?

  • Roll groups? (That seems to be my main issue, according to my very very very limited knowledge trying to wiggle my way around Gibbon.)
  • Courses (in Gibbon)?
  • Other aspects that would help fit this model?
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Hello Matheus and welcome to Gibbon! :grinning:

I am not an expert but I would suggest breaking down your courses into the logical groups that are actually taught and defnining those as courses in Gibbon. You could define the language as “area” and then within each area, the specific topic “Korean for Kids – General” would be defined as a course. Then you would create classes to associate the students with the teachers and lesson times (a class session). Roll groups are only really needed if you have more students attending a course than will fit in one class session. So if you had 20 students taking “Korean for Kids – General” and you wanted to divide them into 2 groups—that is where roll groups would be useful.

Just some thoughts that I hope will get you started…

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Hi Matheus and thanks FV for offering some great advice! It does sound like, based on your use case, that your Languages could be Departments/Learning Areas, Courses + Levels could be a Course, and Groups would be a Class.

As a note, roll groups and year groups are intended more for pastoral groups in a school, often called form groups or homerooms. Students can only have one roll group and one year group per school year. Students do need to be enrolled before they will be considered active in the system, however for cases like yours the school will often create a single roll group and a single year group to contain all students, as a way to bypass using this type of pastoral enrollment.

Hope this helps!

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Thanks, everyone! Sorry for taking so long to answer here.
I think FV’s and Sandra’s suggestions will actually work for us.

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