Just as time is the great unifier of human experiences, so is the shared calendar the central piece holding our learning management system together! 🌀 Almost everything going in and out must pass through the shared calendar, such as the creation of new courses and sessions, billing lecturers, adding assignments, managing attendance and more; hence, it's the key to begin "deciphering" the Core module. 🗝 😉

If you're here because you used the years and terms calendar before and your school transitioned to the new version, please read this 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 tap a course on the sidebar to access the corresponding settings area:

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! 😁

The calendar gets its name from the ability to share a course and its respective sessions across multiple programmes. Say, a Finance and Global Management course both in the Master in Global Management and the Executive MBA, for example. With shared courses, in which students attend the same lectures, it only made sense to have a flexible system constructed upon the concept of unifying and centralising data.

Consequently, when you create a session for a course that's shared between two or more programmes, that session is 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 instance, this will result in Full-time and Part-time MBA students equally having it on their transcripts! Pretty convenient, right? 😃

Furthermore, courses don't have to be always associated with a programme and a class, as schools may have courses that are studied individually, such as in the context of executive education or other forms of tailored education.

In light of the above, the calendar is equipped with a search function and a series of filters to have more of a focused view and quickly find the course(s) you're looking for. The list of filters is collapsed by default to save space, but you can press 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! 🎉

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: March 10, 2021
​LAST UPDATED: March 10, 2021 at 3:25 p.m.