Overview

The concept of the timetabling function is simple.

Enrolments are given a Lesson Length, and are assigned to a Teacher.

Enrolments are allocated to a day and time in the teacher's Schedule.

Using the Schedule as the template, Calendar Entries are created for all of the lessons in the upcoming term.

These calendar entries are then used to generate Attendance Records for the rolls. For more on this topic, see Manage Attendance.

But we all know that scheduling is not that simple! Students have availability restrictions, schools have requirements to accommodate, teaching staff have their own needs. So the complexity in this module comes from the complexity of the real world requirements you're contending with.

Setup

Before you can fill out the schedule, you need a few things in place.

Enrolments
  • Enter your tuition enrolments with their lesson lengths.
  • Make notes on the tuition enrolments regarding any timetabling constraints.
    • Make sure to categorise them as "TT" or "Tch/TT" so that they will be visible in your timetabling screen.
  • See Manage Tuition Fees, Manage Tuition Enrolments, and Use Notes for guidance.
Calendar Exclusions
  • If a student or a group of students is unavailable for lessons at a particular time or day, you can set up Calendar Exclusions so that any lessons scheduled at those times will show up as a clash.
  • See Calendar Exclusions for guidance.
Ensembles
  • It's best if you have already set up your ensembles and group lessons, with their days and times and staff allocated, so they will appear in the teachers' schedules, which will help to avoid scheduling clashes.
  • See Manage Ensemble Enrolments for guidance.
Timeslots
  • Before scheduling enrolments, you can create all the timeslots that your teaching staff are likely to need.
  • See Manage Timeslots for guidance.
Rotation Tag
  • If your school requires lesson times to rotate across the day, to avoid having students missing the same class every week, you use the Rotation Tag to accomplish this.
  • Fortnightly lessons are managed in the same field.
  • See Rotating and Fortnightly Lesson Times for guidance.

Timetabling

With all of the above in place (or as much as possible for the time of year), you're ready to start timetabling.

The best place to manage timetabling is in the teacher's Schedule and, as usual, there are a few ways to get there.

Home > Office Admin > Timetabling

Home > People > Staff > Timetabling

Once in the Timetabling window, you can use the arrows to move from one staff member to the next (or previous), and the Quick Find window to look up a specific staff member.

If you have filled out the staff schedules with timeslots, you will see a list of empty timeslots with a Paste button in each.

In this example you can see a number of things:

  • The teacher has an ensemble scheduled at 8am Monday, so that already appears in the schedule.
  • The ensemble runs for an hour, so it clashes with the 8:30 timeslot that follows it, resulting in that yellow highlight.
  • The ensemble has "F" under Rotation, to indicate that it is scheduled at a fixed time, not on a rotating schedule.
  • The teacher has a red Unallocated Students button visible at the top of the schedule. This indicates that there are students enrolled with this teacher that do not yet appear on the schedule.
Tidy Up Timeslots

Before placing students into timeslots, resolve any clashes that already exist in the schedule. In this example, the orchestra runs until 9:00, so the 8:30-9:00 timeslot should simply not be there.

Go to More... > Delete this timeslot.

If you just need to change the details of the timeslot instead of deleting it altogether, simply select the timeslot anywhere in the scheduling area (the fields from Room to Finish) and it will open an editing window where you can change the details.

Place Students

Once your timeslots are ready, the process for placing a student into a timeslot is to select the red Unallocated Students button, then in the popover that opens select the blue Copy button for the student you wish to place, and then select the grey Paste button for the timeslot you wish to place them into.

If the lesson length doesn't match the duration of the timeslot, Music Monitor will adjust the Finish Time of the timeslot to match what you have placed in it. You may need to tidy up the timeslot that follows it.

Schedule

This list that you are working in is the teacher's Schedule. It is essentially what you expect their Week 1 teaching to look like, and we recommend getting this as perfect as you can before proceeding to the next step.

If you need to make changes in this schedule as you go, there are two main ways.

  1. To make a slight change to a lesson time, you can select the scheduling details of the timeslot to open an editing window and edit the details as noted above.
  2. To move the student to an entirely different timeslot, it's best to select the More... button and select the Clear this timeslot option that appears now you have a student enrolled in the time. This simply removes the allocated student and returns them to the Unallocated Students list, but does not delete the timeslot itself from the teacher's schedule. You can then Copy and Paste the student into a different timeslot.

Note that the entries you make in the Schedule also populate the Regular Bookings tab in the Rooms file.

Go to Home > Resources > Rooms and select the room you have scheduled the lessons in to see these bookings.

Calendar Entries

The Schedule above is essentially a template for that teacher's weekly timetables. You will now use that Schedule to create Calendar Entries for this teacher.

Note that items on the schedule generally show in white, but any booking that has future calendar entries in place will be shaded green.

Depending on how complex the timetabling is, there are two options for how to do this.

One Enrolment at a Time

If you select the Calendar icon on the end of a row on the teacher's Schedule, Music Monitor will create calendar entries across the term for that one enrolment.

The Teacher's Full Schedule

In the More... button on the teacher's Schedule are options for adding all of this teacher's bookings to the calendar at once.

  • ADD ALL these bookings to Calendar Entries - this option, as you may guess, creates Calendar Entries for all bookings on this teacher's Schedule. It does not do anything with unfilled timeslots. This is a very useful script, but if you have already added some bookings to the calendar individually, you may prefer not to use this because it would create duplicates of those entries.
  • Add WHITE bookings only to Calendar Entries - this option is perfect for when you have already added some bookings individually, so they are showing in green, because it does not re-add those ones.
    Take care, however, because if you are doing this for next term, but some teaching dates remain in the current term, you may have bookings that show in green due to upcoming lessons in this term, and they would be overlooked by this script.
Considerations

If your lessons are all on a fixed schedule with few other complications, the above is generally enough to allow you to run these scripts successfully.

If you have rotating lessons, please see Rotating and Fortnightly Lesson Times for more detailed guidance on how to manage this.