External instructors (adjuncts, visiting faculty)

Higher education relies heavily on external instructors: sector-specific adjuncts, professionals who teach occasionally, visiting professors from other institutions. Managing them differs from managing permanent teachers: few hours, a schedule the school has to accommodate rather than set, sometimes contracts paid by the hour.

Marking an instructor as external

In the teacher profile (Managing teachers), the External teacher switch (available with the Premium plan) distinguishes adjuncts from permanent teachers. The marker has two concrete effects:

• an icon in front of the instructor's name in lists and in lesson tooltips,
• a dedicated column in table views and spreadsheet exports, to single out adjuncts (for example to track the hours taught by permanent vs external teachers).

Entering availability

An adjunct's availability is often date-based rather than weekly: they agree to teach on Tuesday 12 March and Tuesday 19 March, but not every Tuesday. For this case, entering availability in calendar mode, included in the Premium plan, is the natural solution.

Without the Premium plan, enter approximate weekly availability (Tuesday afternoons) then lock the lessons one by one by hand.

Service hours and contracting

Adjuncts generally have an hours allocation defined at recruitment (30 hours over the year, a 15-hour module). The Service hours field in the profile tracks the allocation; the diagnostic raises an alert if the planned hours exceed it.

For hourly contracting (payment per lesson rather than per month), the per-teacher statistics export feeds the external payroll / invoicing process.

Communication

Adjuncts sign in to the application less often than a permanent teacher. Three use cases:

• Full account — the adjunct receives credentials and views their timetable, enters their availability, reports their absences from the teacher portal.
• iCal link only — no account, just an iCal subscription link to sync their lessons with their personal calendar.
• E-mail reminder (outside the application) — the administrator notifies the adjunct by e-mail before their teaching slots; the adjunct never signs in. This reminder is manual: Omniscol does not send an automatic notification per lesson. Such a reminder is easy to build outside Omniscol with the schedule-retrieval API, filtering on teachers. A weekly job, for example, builds a summary injected into the school's own template, then sends it through the school's mail service. Going through that service preserves the sender reputation and limits anti-spam false positives.

Calibrate according to the profile (a senior consultant has no time to manage yet another account; a doctoral student who teaches a few hours will adapt easily).