Off-grid lessons and classes

The off-grid class is a separate setting: it is a property of the class, available for calendar-type timetables.

Lesson with custom times

Use custom times when a one-off lesson does not fall exactly on the grid: an exam starting at 08:30, an evening session, a lesson encroaching on a break, a booking that starts before the actual lesson.

The lesson remains visible in the timetable and still takes part in conflict detection. Every entity used by the lesson — teacher, room, class, group or resource — is considered busy as soon as the custom times encroach on a time slot.

For automatic generation, the lesson is treated as unmovable: its position is locked automatically.

When to use an event instead of a lesson

Use a one-off event instead if the need is not a timetable lesson: a meeting, a simple booking, room maintenance, a special day with no teaching volume to account for.

Keep a lesson when the volume must remain attached to a course, a subject, a class, a teacher, a group or a teaching dashboard.

Off-grid class

The off-grid class serves programs whose lessons must all be stored with precise times, independently of the site's grid. It is configured when creating or editing the class, only in calendar-type timetables.

Typical case: a continuing-education program uses the same rooms and the same teachers as initial training, but runs on very different times. The class can then be configured off-grid, with a default time step, for example a quarter of an hour.

In this mode, the class's lessons carry their start and end times directly. They reserve the teachers, rooms, classes, groups and resources involved: an overlap with another lesson is reported as a conflict — not blocking for manual placement, but automatic generation will not place anything on a conflicting slot.

Custom durations

A lesson can also carry custom durations:

• Calculated duration: duration deduced from the start and end times;
• Actual duration: duration used first in dashboards;
• Accounted duration: duration used for billing or the teacher's pay.

Example: for an exam, you can reserve the room before and after the test, while counting only the actual duration of the exam in the Dashboard. For a supervisor, the accounted duration can be higher if the institution also compensates for grading.

Points to watch

• A lesson with custom times can overlap a break or a normally free slot; check that this is really the intention.
• Since the lesson is locked for generation, it can strongly constrain automatic placements around it.
• An off-grid class is a structural choice: it must be selected before creating the class's lessons in bulk.
• Complex lessons (alternations, concatenations, associations) are disabled as soon as explicit times or an off-grid class are involved: the feature is not available in that case.