Lesson / Session

A lesson (or course lesson) is the scheduled unit placed on a timetable grid: it is what you place, move, lock, edit, cancel or substitute. A lesson carries:

• a class or a group (the audience),
• a subject (subject),
• one or more teachers (co-teaching),
• one or more rooms (see multi-room),
• one or more resources (mobile projector, tablet cart…),
• a duration (usually 1 or 2 time units of the site's grid),
• optionally a type (tutorial, practical, lecture, exam, etc., defined via Create),
• optionally a memo (free comment, with a publication restriction: administrators only, administrators + teachers, or everyone).

Lesson or course?

The Omniscol interface says "lesson" for the unit placed on the grid. The course remains the right word for the teaching itself — the subject taught to a class, with its volume and its attributes: you speak of the English course, of course hours, of course days, and one course gives rise to one or more lessons in the timetable. The Type of course label likewise keeps the word "course", and the notion of complex lessons describes courses that combine several lessons.

Vocabulary by context

• Lesson — the interface term for the scheduled unit, whatever the type of institution.
• Class period — a common synonym in primary and secondary education.
• Slot — refers to the time position on the grid rather than the lesson that occupies it.
• An adjunct session is a lesson covered by a visiting (sessional) instructor as opposed to a permanent one; it is not a different course type, only the instructor changes.

Simple lessons, complex courses

A simple lesson = one audience, one teacher, one room, at one time slot.

Complex courses combine several lessons:

• Concatenated — two lessons back to back (a 2-hour practical = a 1-hour practical concatenated with another 1-hour practical).
• Associated — groups rotating across two consecutive lessons (group A in biology then in physics, group B in physics then in biology).
• Alternating — lessons that only recur every other week (week A vs week B), every third week, etc. Configured via Save.

Lessons and classes outside the time grid

By default, lessons align with the time slots of the site's time grid. But Omniscol also handles lessons that do not fit into it (a 2-hour exam starting at 10:20 a.m. on a grid with a 50-minute step). See off-grid lessons and classes.