Disabling dates in units

[justinvincent]

Is it possible to disable the dates within the unit setup or use blocks of time (# of periods?) instead?

[David Tong]

Right now, the start date and end date are required for the units. There were couple schools asked the same questions since TODCM became open source 3 months ago and I didn't realized not all schools use the dates until recently.

I think this is a top priority change for the project since the unit page is the core of the application. The issue is that the change affects all parts of the application such as unit calendar, searches etc. It is a lot more work then just replacing the dates on the unit page with a list of predefined time periods.

Our plan is to add the support of using a list of predefined weeks such as week 1, week 2 etc. instead of using actual dates in the next release. Would this work for you?

[justinvincent]

My school uses a rotating weekly schedule where classes meet 4 or 5 times a week during a different period every day (5 day a week classes meet for less time to accomodate lunch). So our course timelines are broken into periods as opposed to dates. This also makes adjustments due to snow days, delays, or other unscheduled changes to be accomodated. Would it be possible to define a preset number of periods for a course (on the admin side when creating it) and then using that as a base to create the calendar as opposed to using dates? Thanks.

[David Tong]

Yes, I can certainly modify the software to allow class period adjustment for each course. Does this mean the admin has to change the number of class periods per course every year?

Looks to me different schools can have different ways to define the time periods. The schools I had talked to wanted to use time unit by week and your school needs to use class periods. I can make the software to allow the admin to define the time unit in weeks, class periods or just about anything.

One problem is I am not too sure how to change the mapping searches based on class periods. The current searches are based on start date and end date. It looks to me if the site is using class periods then the searches should not ask for a date range. May be use a class period range instead, but it would not be able to distinguish the units from different school years. Do you think this is OK?

[justinvincent]

That actually sounds perfect. The admin (being myself on the applications side) would need to update the number of periods per course. But this would only be a handful of classes as most stick to a specific rotating block year to year unless the number of grade level sections changes. Being unable to distinguish courses from year to year won't be an issue for us. Any idea when a feature like this would be available?

On a side note, our Curriculum planning team (Vice President/Academic Dean, Humanities Department Head, and myself (I am the STEM Department Head)) met yesterday to discuss TODCM and they think it will work perfectly for us. Thank you very much for your help and for making this great pieces of software available.

[David Tong]

I have to come up with the requirements for the date change and see can I fit it into our next release - 1.1.0.5. If this change does fit into the 1.1.0.5 schedule then it should be available in 3-4 months. I will most likely talk to you about the details for this change and may be even ask you to help us to go over the beta version once it is available.

I am glad TODCM fits your school's requirements. Please let me know if you need any help with the various features in the application.

[justinvincent]

Sounds great, Thanks alot.