Exporting 'out-of-block' lessons to an MIS

Exporting Out of Block Lessons

  Q.   I have used Container Blocks in the sixth form, OK, ...but to get it all working I had to put a couple of the lessons OOB ‘out-of-block’, knowing that it worked at student level with no clashes.
In fact there was a spare double in the sixth form so all I did was create a simple block of the lessons that had to move into this.

My question is: I have teaching groups 13-EC-B, 13-DR-D, 13-POL-C which exist in the ‘proper’ blocks, but each have an out of block period where Ec, Dr and Pol are scheduled together.  We want the teaching groups for out-of-block lessons to be the same as the proper block ie. 13-EC-B for the export to the MIS.  I’ve been playing around with the sets/blocks etc but just can’t get it, the closest I can do is 13-EC-B/2

  A.   One of the rules of teaching groups is that two groups cannot have the same name, if they are (according to the curriculum diagram) for different classes/students ...which is the (apparent) situation with out-of-block lessons. The solution is to put these out-of-block activities back in the Container Block (at least while you export).

Although this sounds odd, you can (provided you have now finished scheduling) now put the out-of-block lessons back into the Container Blocks that they want to go with, ...by going to the Curriculum Diagram, highlighting the activity, then clicking "Open List-View" to see all the activities listed one-by-one.  Here you can change an activity's "Container ID" to make sure that like groups are in the same Container.  (eg. to put an activity into Container Block 'A', just enter 'A' in the "Container ID" box).

You have to use the "List-View" method for this, as the "wizard" method of editing activities won't allow you to just put an already-scheduled lesson into a Container Block like this.

Before doing any of this you may wish to Clone your schedule [section H27 in your Manual], or at least save a copy in the AutoBackup Library, ...so that you can return to the original version of the schedule if you wish to do any further work in the future.

Notes:

- There is more detail about this in a PDF you can download from here.
- See also this article on scheduling OOB lessons.