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Schedule Development

In order to create a timetable we have to know certain values:

  1. DaysPerCycle - The cycle that the days are built around. In some schools this might be 1 if all days are the same for a very short school term. If following a normal week it might be 5. A bi-weekly timetable would be 10. Our school operates on a 6 day cycle.

    This must be uniform across all grades in the school. If not, you'll have to run 2 copies of Open Admin, since they are basically different schools in the same building.

  2. multiTerm - Different grade levels may have a different number of terms in the year with different start and ending dates. For example, grades K-6 might have 3 terms per year, while grades 7-12 might have 4. This can be accomodated within Open Admin by setting values in the main configuration file, etc/admin.conf, turning on multiTerm ($multiTerm = 1), and setting the dates for the different terms. Each grade is associated with one of these term tracks.

  3. PeriodsPerDay - Each grade can have a different number of periods per day (ppd). Again, this is set in the etc/admin.conf file.

The schedat table consists of:

  1. id - unique access key

  2. day - a DayInCycle value (based on the number of days in the school cycle) such as 1 or 2 or 3.

  3. period - the period number of the day (starting from 1). It may have a value up to the number of PeriodsPerDay for that grade.

  4. subjsec - the subject-section value for a particular class.

  5. term - one of the school terms. There are entries for each school term to make a, possibly unique, timetable for each term for each grade. (It may or may not change from term to term) A term is a period of time with tests/assessments at the end.

  6. grade - a grouping of students based on age and ability level.

A timetable block will be all the records for a particular grade for a particular term. (ie. The Grade 7 timetable for Term 1.) Each cell in the timetable will have one or more subject-sections (in case of backings). Each cell will have a day (ie. DayInCycle), a period, and a subject-section (called subjsec in scripts) in order to describe it.


next up previous contents
Up: Open Administration for Schools Previous: IEP Data Overview

2010-07-27