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Class group


A class group is a set of students participating together in most lessons. Each student in the school belongs to exactly one class group. A class group can, but doesn't have to, be split into subgroups by means of so called divisions.

Skolaris automatically creates a teaching group for each class group that is entered.

Tabs

Preferences

Timeslot availability

Change availability for timeslots in which lessons must not or should not be scheduled. Based on the percentage a slot is either fully available (100), undesired (90-10) or unavailable (0).

The controlling constraint is Lesson: Class group availability. The overall penalty for using an undesired slot is a product of the constraint penalty and the slot availability percentage.

Preferred rooms

Add a preferred room to indicate lessons should (or must) be scheduled into that room. Increase weight for rooms with higher priority.

If some rooms are required, they are the only allowed rooms and the lessons may not be placed into another room. The controlling constraint is Lesson: Class group preferred room.

Subgroups

Divisions

A division is a splitting of a class group into two or more subgroups, for example for languages and PE lessons.

Subgroups

A subgroup is the smallest unit of teaching. Subgroups are assigned to teaching groups for which courses and eventually lessons are created.

Skolaris doesn't work with individual students. If such granular division is required, subgroups of size 1 can be used for each student.

Advanced settings

Pairs of independent subgroups
These are pairs of subgroups from different divisions that are mutually exclusive, i.e. share no students between them. They can be used to model advanced relations within class groups with multiple divisions.

For example, suppose a class group is divided by gender to 'Boys' and 'Girls' and further by language option to 'French' and 'Spanish'. Further suppose that French is only studied by a subset of girls and Spanish is studied by boys and the remaining girls. Then the 'Boys' and 'French' subgroups are independent and theoretically can be scheduled simultaneously to the same timeslot. However, the girls studying Spanish would be idle in that period, so for most schools, this setup is neither required nor allowed.

Pairs of independent subgroups are only available if the class group contains multiple divisions.

Students

List of students for the purpose of choosing optional subjects.

Import

Students can be imported from a CSV file with three columns: First name, Last name and email. The header row should be included.

Courses

List of courses involving this class group.

Lessons

List of lessons involving this class group. Use this tab to create new lessons for the whole class group or any of the subgroups.

Properties

Students

Enter the number of students in the class group. This is only necessary if you'd like Skolaris to check room capacity for you.

Year group

Select a year group to inherit a class group configuration set from it.

Active

Inactive objects do not appear in the system except at the end of the master lists and in old data. Deactivate objects you don't need anymore, but they are part of old timetables that you want to keep intact.

Optimisation settings

Effective configuration set

The configuration set groups together settings that are likely to repeat for multiple class groups, such as maximum allowed periods per day etc. It is inherited from the term or year group, or can be set individually.

See help for Class group configuration.

Transport speed coefficient

Transit times between campuses are divided by this decimal coefficient. This can be used for modelling situations when the class group can reach the destination faster than by using public transport, or when the class groups needs more time for transport for any reason (in which case the coefficient will be a number between 0 and 1).