Courses, lessons, course types

Three related but distinct objects to tell apart in Omniscol: the course (the abstract teaching unit), the lesson (a concrete instance of the course, on a specific date), and the course type (the classification: lecture, tutorial, practical…).

Course

A course is the atomic teaching unit: a subject, a class or a group, a teacher, a classroom, a duration, a number of weekly occurrences (or a calendar of dates in calendar mode).

Example: "Mathematics in Grade 6 A, taught by Mr. Durand, 4 hours per week in room B204".

The course carries the teaching logic: who learns what with whom. This is what you build in the Timetable management module. See also the glossary definition: Course.

Lesson

A lesson is a concrete occurrence of a course, with a date and a time. From the course Mathematics in Grade 6 A, 4h/week, Omniscol generates 4 lessons per week over the active weeks (for example Monday 8-9 a.m., Tuesday 10-11 a.m., Wednesday 2-3 p.m., Friday 9-10 a.m.).

The lesson is what is visible in the Timetable module, in the portals, and in the iCal exports. One-off changes (moving, canceling, substituting) also apply to the lesson.

It is the term the interface uses for the unit placed on the grid: what you place, move, lock, edit, cancel or substitute is a lesson (or "course lesson" when the extra precision helps).

Course type

A course type classifies each course beyond its subject: lecture, tutorial, practical, exam, remote, field trip. The type is used for:

• business logic (an exam is not handled like a tutorial),
• statistics (tutorial hours vs lecture hours per teacher),
• readability (display in the timetables).

See Types of course (tutorial, practical, exam, lecture, etc.) for detailed type management.

Where courses live in the structure

Depending on how complex the class structure is, courses are attached either to their class (the standard case) or transversally to the classes (when groups of groups are used or when a lesson has several groups at once). This is transparent for the user — Omniscol switches automatically according to the structure. See Groups of groups.

Simple vs complex courses

A course can be simple (one teacher, one class, one subject, one classroom, a regular recurrence) or complex: A/B week alternation, concatenations (double lessons), associations (rotation between groups), co-teaching (several teachers). See Complex lessons.