Courses view

Topic 5 of 10

The next task is to define the teaching requirements, meetings or courses in your school. Their timing is defined later on in Timetables view. If you have defined more than one term in the school year, you have to allocate the lectures to them in Weeks view, before you can process them further in Timetables view. If you have only one term, you can pass the allocation stage and go directly to Timetables view.

Mimosa allows you to define all kind of combinations from class-based teaching to all kind of split and combined groups. The courses are the core of the school and the data file and there are several ways to create them. For a school you might need to create from 50 to 2000 courses to define all its lectures.

Select form the Window menu  or click [Ctrl+F6] to have  Courses view as the active view.

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. Below are examples of different types of course collections:

Note that when there are two or more 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.

To assign the lectures of the courses to timetables, activate next the Timetables view from the Window menu of click [Ctrl+F6] until it becomes visible.