Running classes
Manage Classes is the timetable side of the console. Two tabs — Upcoming and Previous — and everything about a session hangs off it.
Classes and sessions
Section titled “Classes and sessions”One distinction to hold onto:
- A class is what you scheduled: a title, a time, a duration, a recurrence.
- A session is one occurrence of it on a date.
A weekly class for ten weeks is one class and ten sessions. Attendance, notes and recordings belong to a session. Cancelling one Tuesday cancels a session; cancelling the class cancels the lot.
Creating a class
Section titled “Creating a class”| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Title | What appears on everyone’s schedule |
| Description | Optional — what the session covers |
| Type | Class, workshop, office hour, masterclass, and so on |
| Cohort and course | Which offering this class belongs to |
| Start time and duration | Duration in minutes |
| Meeting link | For online sessions |
| Location and room | For in-person sessions |
| Recurrence | One-off, or a repeating pattern |
| Co-instructors | Others teaching alongside you |
Attaching the class to a cohort and course is what puts it on the right people’s schedules, and it is what lets attendance count towards their grade. A class with no offering behind it is a calendar entry and nothing more.
Recurrence
Section titled “Recurrence”Pick the days of the week and an end date, and the sessions are generated for you. Weekdays is one click.
Generate the term in one go rather than adding sessions weekly. It puts the whole timetable in front of learners at once, and it means a calendar sync carries the term rather than next week.
Auto-populate
Section titled “Auto-populate”Auto-populate fills the class form from a cohort or a course rather than asking you to retype it. For a term of regular classes across several offerings, it is the difference between ten minutes and an hour.
Taking the register
Section titled “Taking the register”After a session, Mark attendance opens the roster.
| Status | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Present online | Attended remotely |
| Present in-person | Attended in the room |
| Late | Arrived after the start |
| Absent | Did not attend |
| Not marked | The default, before you mark anything |
Each row takes an optional note, which is where “left early, family emergency” belongs.
There is a bulk action for marking a whole roster at once — mark everyone present, then change the handful who were not.
Why this is worth doing promptly
Section titled “Why this is worth doing promptly”Attendance usually counts towards the final grade — around a quarter of it in the default scheme. An unmarked register is not a neutral state; it is marks that have not been awarded.
Your dashboard’s Pending attendance panel exists for exactly this, and it is the panel worth clearing before you log off.
Learners are not emailed each time their attendance is recorded, by default. They can see it on their own Attendance tab, which is where they will check before asking you.
Cancelling
Section titled “Cancelling”Cancel class on a session cancels that occurrence and takes a reason. The session stays on everybody’s schedule, marked cancelled, with the reason shown.
That is deliberate. A deleted session leaves “was there a class on the 14th?” with no answer, and someone always asks.
Learners are notified when a class is cancelled or moved, and if they have a connected calendar, the entry is updated there too.
Delete removes a class outright, and there is a batch version for clearing a mis-generated recurrence. Use cancel for something that was scheduled and did not happen; use delete for something that should never have been scheduled.
Recordings
Section titled “Recordings”Add recording attaches a recording to a session. Learners see it under their Recordings tab and are notified.
Publishing is a deliberate step. A session that happened does not become a recording until somebody adds one, which is the right default — not every session should be published, and the person who ran it is the one who knows.
Notes and transcripts attach to a session the same way.
Calendars
Section titled “Calendars”If your organisation has calendar integration switched on, creating, editing or cancelling a class writes to the calendars of everyone who has connected one.
It writes on change, which means a learner who connects a calendar today gets nothing for classes that already exist. Their classes page offers a Sync my classes button for exactly that, and it is worth telling a cohort about it once at the start of a term rather than fielding the question ten times.