Creating Sessions in a class

Know where you’re at with timetables

With the flexibility of timetabled sessions you can specify every event of the class, where it where be held, and who will teach it. This is then visually displayed as a timetable which can be viewed from the course, the class, from the venue or room and from the tutor.

When you first set up a class, by setting sessions, onCourse will automatically calculate the start date, end date and times to save you having to manually calculate this information. If you decide to add sessions once you have already typed in this information, the session times set (if different to what you typed in the general information) will overwrite these fields to make them consistent.

The real power of the session timetables feature is the flexibility of changing the venue, tutor or class times for just one session. Say, for example, that you have a guest lecturer running two of the sessions of an eight session course in the lecture hall, instead of the standard classroom, you can easily record this. The timetable is then visible to your administrative staff, the tutors and site coordinators and of course, the students, so everyone knows where and when they should be in class.

How to create a class timetable

1. Open the class record from the classes screen. You can not access timetables by opening a class from within the course.
2. Go to the timetable tab. The default view is of the current month.
3. Expand the session list view by selecting the dot and dragging to resize. The red arrow in the image below points to the resizing dot.

Window resize option to view list of sessions

4. Click the + symbol towards the bottom right of the screen to begin adding sessions.
5. If you have already assigned a venue and tutor to the class, they will be selected by default. Changing them will not change the information in the other parts of the class record.
6. Enter the first session date and time e.g. 20/2/08 6pm. When you move to the next field this will be formatted to to 20/2/08 6:00 PM. Hovering over the field will show you the day of the week and date in long format.
7. Enter the duration. You can enter in hours e.g. 2.30 or in hours and minutes e.g. 2h 30min. However you enter the text, it will be formatted to hours and minutes when you move to the next field.
8. Set the repetition to the number of sessions you want and how often. e.g. if the class has eight sessions, one every Wednesday for eight weeks, set the repetition to 8, 1 repeat every week.
9. Save the sessions and they will appear in the timetable (you may need to move your calendar view to the correct month). Your timetable should look similar to the one below.

Eight session timetable

Q&A – Modifying sessions

Q – How do I change the tutor and venue for a particular session?
A – Double click the session you want to modify in the list and make the changes you want in the edit window.

Q – How do I create sessions for a class that has eight sessions total, with 4 on a Monday and 4 on a Wednesday?
A – Create a new session, setting the date for the first Monday of class, with 4 weekly repetitions, save them, then click on + again and create another 4 weekly sessions from the first Wednesday of class. 8 total sessions will be created.

Q – One of the scheduled sessions falls on a Public Holiday. How to I remove it and add another session on to the end the class?
A – Open the session that falls on the Public Holiday and change the date to the new date you wish to hold the session.

Q – I created 52 weeks of sessions for a class that runs for a whole year. There are no sessions in the school holidays. How do I delete them?
A – Find the sessions you wish to remove, select them and choose the – button to remove them (next to the + button on the bottom right of the screen)

Q – How do I create a class that runs Monday to Friday for three weeks?
A – When creating your first session, create 15 repetitions, check the box ‘skip weekends’ and set to 1 repeat every day.