Welcome to the shared calendar! If you used the years and terms calendar before, then you've come to the right place, because this article will help you acquainted with the new version and make the most of it! 😃

If you've never used the years and terms calendar and are completely new to Core, please read this other article instead. 😉

➜ What's the shared calendar?

➜ Why a “shared” calendar?

➜ How does the calendar appear to staff, lecturers and students?

The shared calendar is the heart of the Core module. It's an online timetable that gives you accurate real-time information about the lectures for the week and the courses they belong to and lets you move forward or backwards in time, thus mirroring the daily routines of students and school personnel. ⏳

Aside from being used to keep a record of past and future sessions, it also captures much of the academic information pertaining to classes and students, including syllabi, attendance, assignments and resources, lecturers, grades, and so on – all that's necessary to plan one's work and time. 😍 Just click on a course on the calendar sidebar to access its respective settings:

This single interface combining so much key information in one system was designed to be intuitively understood and operated by everybody, since it targets staff, lecturers and students. It's therefore simple, efficient and user-friendly… and quite aesthetically appealing, if we may say so! 😁

In short, there's been a big structural change to the calendar. As most of you will remember, it was previously set up around the concept of academic years and terms, whereby each class had a number of bars representing its respective academic year or the terms that comprised it (e.g., Summer, Autumn, Spring), and selecting a bar opened the corresponding timetable:

This meant that there were separate calendars for each programme. Generally, that was fine – unless a course was shared across multiple programmes, that is. Say, a Finance and Global Management course both in the Master in Global Management and the Executive MBA, for instance. With shared courses, in which students attend the same lectures, staff had to access the calendar for each specific programme and then add the sessions to both of them, leading to duplicate work. 😩 Inevitably, this called for the need of a calendar that could be shared between multiple programmes, in order to properly share the lectures as well.

That need has been met! 🌟 The aforementioned calendars were unified into one, no longer organised by years and terms because the data is fully centralised! As a consequence, the calendar is now more flexible than ever, equipped with a search function and a series of filters to have a focused view and quickly find the course or courses you're looking for! 😁 The list of filters is collapsed by default to save space, but you can tap the arrow to expand it:

As you can see, there are four filters:

All of the filters are available to staff, lecturers and students alike, except for Class, which is only available to staff and lecturers. The filters are applied instantly and revert to default when you close the calendar. As for the search function, it will just search the courses from the filters you applied, immediately suggesting possible matches as you type.

Whichever your selection, the calendar will then proceed to find sessions for the related courses in accordance to what was defined in the study template, thereby letting you see all of the possible courses for the selected programme! 🎉

What's more, when you create a session for a course that's shared between two or more programmes, that session is now automatically linked to all of them. So, supposing there's a "Statistical Analysis" course that's featured on the study plan template of the Part-time and Full-time MBAs, for example, this will result in Full-time and Part-time MBA students equally having it on their transcripts! Pretty convenient, right? 😃

The staff and lecturer view is almost identical, given that both sit on the backend side of things. Lecturers just have a few restrictions, namely not being able to create new sessions and courses on the calendar, as it doesn't fall under their "jurisdiction", and only being shown the corses they're associated to, to protect sensitive data:

Following the same logic of adapting the calendar to the unique nature of each role, students can only visualise information about themselves and never of others: ergo, their lessons, their grades, their attendance reports, and so forth. 🙇🏻‍♀️ Likewise, they lack the Class course filter. The only action they're permitted is the submission of assignments, a staple of lecture rooms around the globe. 🌎

Another great thing about the calendar is that it's compatible with iCal, so that staff, lecturers and students can keep better track of their busy schedules. 📆 By subscribing to the Core iCal feed, you'll be displayed the subject name, time and room of a session, along with the session name (if one exists), the subject code, and, in the event description, the lecturers and guest lecturers. The more information is provided up front, the easier it is to stay on top of things! 💪

PUBLISHED: February 17, 2020
​LAST UPDATED: March 10, 2021 at 4:36 p.m.