Shared Courses (Arbor)

'Shared Courses' in Arbor

If you have subscribed to the 'Shared Courses module' in Arbor, (also known as 'Shared Teaching') then Arbor give the following advice on how to work in TimeTabler, and export to Arbor :

       What is the 'Shared Courses module' ?
-- Arbor say: The 'shared courses' or 'shared teaching' functionality is essentially a separate module, that allows one of the schools in the partnership (or even someone at MAT [multi-academy trust] level) to set up template classes and lessons, and then push them down to each of the schools teaching them.
Because at the moment, the shared classes and lessons have to be set up from the shared teaching admin module (we will likely look to iterate on this in the future to make this process easier), we're currently catching any lesson that come in from TimeTabler that are mapped to the shared teaching courses that have been pushed down to each individual school, to avoid duplicate lessons.

       Do I need to do anything different in TimeTabler ?
No; you write your timetable in TimeTabler in the usual way.  The only difference is that you need to set-up your shared courses in Arbor before you export from TimeTabler to Arbor .
 -- Arbor say: We knew that schools would want all their courses in their timetable, in order to make the most of all of the tools that TimeTabler have in terms of optimising their timetable, so wanted to handle it in a way that still allowed that.
The only key difference is that they need to make sure that their Shared Teaching courses are already in Arbor to map to before they do a TimeTabler  import, otherwise we won't be able to catch any duplicates. They do only have to do this for shared teaching courses though, and could still import their course structure from TimeTabler  for the other year groups (shared teaching generally being for sixth forms, so KS3 and KS4 structure could come in from TimeTabler if the school wanted).

Notes:

- More details here, on the Arbor web-site.

- This Arbor module is likely to be useful if you are developing a 'federal' timetable across several schools, see the article on this topic.