Free groups

It is Omniscol's wild card: use it when the strict model of a class plus subgroups in a division does not fit. Very common in:

• art schools (open-enrollment workshops, cross-disciplinary projects),
• semi-autonomous projects — a small group of students who work together under the light supervision of a teacher who mainly looks after their own class nearby and regularly stops by to check on their progress,
• cross-class lectures, masterclasses, guest seminars,
• voluntary remedial sessions and clubs,
• research projects and short internships with open enrollment.

Behavior

A free group is attached to a class like any group, with a headcount and, depending on the account configuration, a list of students. What changes is how Omniscol checks for conflicts.

On a free group's lesson, Omniscol disables three types of checks:

• conflicts with the rest of the class on the same time slot,
• conflicts with another lesson of the same teacher,
• conflicts with a classroom that is already occupied.

This is what lets the free group work as a satellite group on the main class's grid: the main lesson takes place, and the free group's lesson sits alongside it without triggering any alert.

A free group's lessons appear explicitly in the timetable of the students concerned, like every other lesson.

When to use a free group vs a regular group

Usage precaution — the real limit

First and foremost: prefer real subgroups in a division whenever you can. The free group is a wild card to be used sparingly, reserved for cases where no other clean solution works.

The reason: in practice, the parallel placement must be managed by the human planner. The automatic generation algorithm has no way of knowing that a given semi-autonomous group must be scheduled alongside one specific lesson of the class's main course. If you let it run, the free group's lessons can land at any time — regardless of what the rest of the class is doing.

Good practice: manually position the free group's lesson on the same time slot as the targeted main lesson, then lock its position so that automatic generation does not touch it. See Locking a lesson.

Creation

When creating the group (using Add group), check the Free group option. An icon then marks these groups in the lists so they are not confused with ordinary groups.

Effects of disabling conflicts

Concretely, on a free group's lesson:

• if Alice (a student in the class) attends this lesson while another main lesson takes place for the rest of the class on the same time slot, Omniscol raises no alert (even though she is in theory expected in two places at the same time);
• the teacher can be assigned to another lesson on the same time slot, again without any alert;
• the classroom can already be occupied by the main lesson without an alert.

This tolerance is deliberate. It is up to you (the planner) to ensure that this coexistence makes pedagogical sense (typically: the teacher just stops by from time to time to check on the semi-autonomous group; the group's students step out of the main lesson without causing any problem; the room hosts both activities).