Setting up tutor records & contacting staff

Managing your staff with ease

A tutor is anyone who teaches a class for, or on behalf of, your college. They may be an employee or a contractor, and could also be a student of your college having enrolled in classes.

You need their contact details on file and what classes and sessions they are scheduled to teach. If you are an RTO you will also need to keep their resume and copies of their qualifications on file.

If you have a large number of casual staff who work at a variety of different venues, it can be difficult to manage communication as you might not see them in person very often. Tutors in onCourse can be emailed or SMS’d easily and all messages sent out of the system are tracked in the tutors record. Before you begin setting up your tutor records, think about the ways or reasons your college may need to contact different groups of tutors quickly. An example of using tagging to manage the communication to specific groups of staff is available here

Setting up a tutor

1. Open the tutor window from the splash screen or from the ‘People’ menu

2. If the tutor is a contractor, and a company, select the “is company” checkbox and enter the company name.

3. Enter the address and contact details. If you have a mobile number, ensure it is entered in the mobile field so it can be used for SMS contact.

4. You can also set a start and end date for a staff member. By entering end dates, you can avoid contacting staff who have left the company.

5. If you wish, you can add the relevant text from the staff members’ resume to the ‘resume’ tab. This information will be visible to students on the website, so it is recomended that you obtain permission from the tutor to publish this information. The text in the field can be formatted using Rich text

6. You can attach scanned copies of full resumes, references, qualifications and anything else you may require to the ‘notes’ tab of the tutor record. These are not published to the website or visible to students.

Once a tutor has been created and linked to the classes they teach, you can view their scheduled classes and timetables on the tabs in their tutor record. They can also see this information when they log in to the college website.

Tutor contact details

Contacting tutors by email or SMS

You must have set up an SMS and email gateway with ish to use this feature. For information on how to do this, go here

1. Open the tutor window and use the ‘find’ to search for the tutors you want to contact

2. Highlight the tutors you wish to contact in the list (select the first, hold down shift, select the last) and click on the cog wheel icon on the bottom right.

3. Choose “send message to xx contacts” and the email/SMS window will open.

4. You will see in your list of contacts how many people can be emailed (have supplied an email address), can be SMS’d (have supplied a mobile number) or neither.

5. Select ‘send email’ and/or ‘send SMS’. If you choose to send both, you can also select the option under SMS ‘including people who are emailed’. If people have supplied both mobile and email address, it is a cheaper option (and the default option) to just email them, and only SMS those who don’t have email. However, sometimes you may wish to send both, just to make sure. While most of the time it only takes a few seconds to deliver an SMS, it is not an instantaneous technology, even if it often seems this way. It can take up to 3 days for an SMS to be delivered, which has to do with the phone carrier, which ish have no control over, or because the user currently has their phone switched off.

6. Type your email and/or your SMS and hit send.

7. Under preferences, you can see the SMSs and emails waiting in the queue to be sent. You do not receive bounced email address or failed SMS notifications, so if the message is urgent and requires a response that you do not receive, you may wish to follow up with a phone call.