Unified timetable view for teachers

Administration
1

Hello,

TLDR: Is there an option to show teachers their courses in multiple timetables in one view at the “Home” page?
So that if I teach lesson 1 and 2 in the first timetable and lesson 4 in another timetable I didn’t have to select the different timetables?

Situation:

We have three year groups with one form group per year at our school. We have theoretical courses which last from 1 to 2 lessons, and we have practical training which always spans 3 lessons. We don't have a lot of teachers, and because the practical training lessons are taught in subgroups, we have to spread them out so that some of them are from timeslot 3 to 5 and others are from timeslot 6 to 8. In addition the practial trainings rotate either on a three or six week base with either two or tree groups in the course. So the timetable changes quite a lot for students and teachers.

My Try:

First I thought of making 1 timetable with two different days (mo-do 8 rows and fri 6 rows). In this scenario a teacher would have to take attendance data and take his notes three times in one practical training session. Another downside would be the three entries in the timetable view which are just one session.

So I decided against it and created colums for

weekday
weekday with practical training in the morning
weedkay with practical training in the afternoon
friday
friday with practical training

and the respective rows (including breaks) where the practical training is just one longer timeslot.

I created three timetables (one for each year group) since they have their practical training at different times.
I created the either three or six days for each weekday and each year group depending on the rotation of the practical training lessons.
(Thank you so much for the import function!!!)

Now I am at the state of tying the days to dates so I could take a first glance at my timetable.
As far as I can see the timetable should look as expected for the student, I also get the nice big practical training blocks I wanted, but the teacher is only seeing one timetable at a time.
Since it represents the working week for the teacher I would have expected that every user gets a timetable with every timeslot they are in. Otherwise it is hard to spot double bookings and it is one additional click to enter the lesson details (if the timetable on the “Home” page is considered as main path for the daily work).

Options?

  • Is there a way to get a unified timetable view for the teachers?
  • Do I have to fall back to use one timetable and add three consecutive lessons for the practical training?
    • In this case - is there a way to unite (show them in one field, enter data only one time) consecutive lessons?
  • Is there another option I did not think of?
    • Is it maybe possible to create a timetable for all years and add different columns for the same Day for different year groups? Could it be this simple and am I just thinking too complicated and wasting your time?

    btw: I really love the flexibility in Gibbons timetabling system. I tend to find our timetable rather complicated to create and explain. The concept Gibbon uses is lightyears ahead of the … lets call it “system” … we use to calculate the payment of our teachers. And don’t get me started about the import system. Since I am still evaluating I also had a look at other (proprietary) systems. The (probably) market leader here has nothing comparable, you have to enter everything by hand!

    best regards,

    Paul

2

Hi Paul, great to hear you’re finding the timetable flexible enough for your needs. It can often be daunting at first, because the flexibility adds some complexity, but it really does enable a wide range of possible timetables.

There isn’t currently a unified way to view different timetables together, because different timetables can have widely different day structures, there’s no simple way to overlap them. There is a timetable switcher which lets teachers look between the timetables.

Using one timetable would help alleviate this issue. If you’re using attendance by class, and the same class is timetabled multiple times in a day, luckily the attendance only needs taken once for that class. Lesson plans on the other hand are tied to a specific period, but the work around is for teachers and students to become familiar using the first period of a block of two/three to store lesson plans. They’re easy to see because those periods will have a green checkmark. Ideally, if the day structures are the same, then using the same timetable does make life easier.

Hope this helps!

3

Hello Sandra,

thank you very much for your answer.

So maybe I had the wrong mindset about timetables.

Since you and Ross referred to Drupal multiple times maybe I can describe it in Drupal terms.
I thought when tying a timetable to a day the entities (lessons) are created with start- and endtime. Therefore I assumed it would be possible to create a view just like a standard calendar with every entity that has a reference to the user shown. In such a case the complexity of multiple timetables would not matter, since the view is designed around time and dates. Since I assume a teacher should not be able to attend two classes at the same time there also should be no problem with overlapping bookings.

So looking through the database it seems that the timetable view periods are not prefilled with the information added for every day, but a skeleton created on the fly by joining the date, timetable day, timetable column and timtablecolumnrows. This design has to be faster and more flexible than creating “entites” on tying a timetable day to a date.

Did I get it right this time?
This has some serious implications on the workflow I had in mind and on some questions I still have.