Courses are sets of components defining all teaching requirements for the institution (such as school or university). For each course, you must select its own set of components (=collections) to define how it is synchronised with other resources (classes, teachers, rooms) and also define the lectures for all weeks or terms and later assign them in timetables.
Courses are abstract concepts, such projects, events, sessions, modules, and they always contain one or more components before they can be scheduled. Courses link together several components and when assigning courses into timetables, all timetables related to the collections of each course must have free slots in the same time. This enables the user to only deal with the courses instead of components; the complicated task to check that the assignments of the linked components are valid is left to Mimosa.
You can edit courses in Courses view or click [Ctrl+H] in any other view and then select Modify.
Suppose that the class LineA must study three hours in a week the course called Nursing of People at Different Ages, taught by NICHOLSON in room R112. We use the abbreviation NURSING for that course and go to the selection Edit|Insert (or press [Insert]) to create it. As with components, you associate a unique code of at most 15 characters, a descriptive name of at most 63 characters and select the appropriate category (from the list of course categories you created in Options|Categories:
Use Add button in that window to move the selected components from the right-hand list (green) to the left-hand list (blue), and Remove button to do the reverse operation. You can also Swap two components between the both lists. You can pick several components at once by keeping the [Ctrl] button pressed while clicking the components with the mouse.
Components of this course (3):
All addable components (10):
With a similar procedure you can create all courses of your school, and in most cases courses consist of a class, teacher and room, but there are other combinations. If the teacher is required to teach pupils from two classes simultaneously, both classes are added to the left-hand list. To demonstrate this example, create the following course:
Suppose that two teachers divide one class to two smaller groups and give them intensive teaching in two rooms:
Sometimes pupils from several classes are mixed with several teachers. The pupils from classes LineA and LineB are divided among three teachers PACINO, PESCI and PFEIFFER to study 5 hours either Anatomy, Astronomy or Athletics, respectively:
The list of courses after adding the examples above might look like the following:
The most common way to define those set of mixed courses containing several teachers and classes is to include all classes (C1,C2,C3,C4), teachers (T1,T2,T3) and rooms (R1,R2,R3) in the same course. The application neither knows nor cares which one of the pupils is attending the lectures of each teacher. The course, when defined in this way, keeps always all classes (and other components) occupied at the same time, and the list of components is: C1, C2, C3, C4, T1, T2, T3, R1, R2, R3.
The order of the components is not relevant, you could also list them as C1, C2, C3, C4, T1, R1, T2, R2, T3, R3 to emphasize in timetables where each teacher is located.
Note that when there are more than one classes and teachers that should be connected together, it helps to view the setting in a form of a table as follows:
Note that the structures of the collections you define for courses are special cases of the above 4x3 matrix. In most cases, there is only one row and one column, and in some cases one row or one column.
Using of subjects as components in courses is basically descriptive and voluntary, and recommended in mixed courses as the one below. If the course structure is simple, the course name is often used instead do describe the course content. Adding a set of subjects (S1,S2,S3) to the course tells the readers of the timetable what the teachers are doing. The subjects can also be used as comments and for statistical reasons to count the sums of lectures of different types. By default, subjects are not (naturally) conflict-checked, which enables to teach some subject simultaneously by different courses.
When you add the subjects to the course collection, you can insert them where the corresponding teachers and rooms are, to make them more readable in printouts. Below are samples from some typical layouts:
Use the arrow keys to move the component up or down on the list to get the desired result. The same order is used when timetables are printed.