Summary
ClassroomOS is where teaching is planned and where it is proved to have happened. It holds the timetable, the rooms, the class groups, the schemes of work, the lesson plans and the coverage view that compares what was taught against what the curriculum promised.
The important idea is that these are one system, not five screens. A lesson plan is attached to an item in a scheme of work; a timetabled session delivers that lesson; the attendance and evidence captured in that session are what make the coverage view true. Coverage is not typed in — it is computed from teaching that actually took place.
Who This Guide Is For
- Operations and campus managers who build the timetable
- Academic managers who own the scheme of work and watch coverage
- Facilitators who plan and deliver the lessons
Prerequisites
- At least one programme with modules or outcomes captured
- At least one campus, and the teaching spaces at it
- Facilitators on the system with a login, so sessions can be assigned to them
Step 1: Set Up Teaching Spaces
Navigate to Classroom → Spaces.
A space is a room, a workshop, a simulated work environment or a computer lab. Capture its capacity and what it is equipped for. Two things depend on it later: the scheduler will not double-book a space, and a readiness review will ask you to prove the workshop you claim to teach in exists.
Tip: Capture the real capacity, not the optimistic one. The scheduler treats capacity as a hard constraint, and a room recorded as holding 30 when it holds 18 produces a timetable that cannot be delivered.
Step 2: Define Academic Cycles and Class Groups
Navigate to Classroom → Cycles to set the term or block structure, then Classroom → Groups to create the class groups that will be taught together.
A class group is the teaching unit. It is not the same thing as a cohort in ProgrammeOS — a cohort is an intake with a start date and a journey; a class group is the set of people who sit in a room together. One cohort is often split across several class groups, and one class group occasionally draws from two cohorts.
Step 3: Build the Scheme of Work
Navigate to Classroom → Schemes.
A scheme of work maps curriculum items to the sequence they will be taught in. Build it once per programme and reuse it every intake. Each item is what a lesson plan later attaches to, and what the coverage view counts against.
Tip: Sequence the scheme the way the trade is actually learned, not the way the qualification document lists outcomes. The document is an index; the scheme is a plan.
Step 4: Timetable the Sessions
Navigate to Classroom → Timetable to place sessions by hand, or Classroom → Scheduler to let the auto-scheduler propose a timetable.
The scheduler takes the class groups, the spaces, the facilitators and their availability, and produces a timetable that satisfies the constraints it can and reports the ones it cannot. Read the report. A scheduler that silently drops a constraint is worse than one that says it could not place three sessions — and this one says so.
Always review a generated timetable before publishing it. The scheduler optimises for the constraints it was given; it does not know that a particular facilitator should not teach two practical sessions back to back.
Step 5: Plan the Lessons
Navigate to Classroom → Lessons.
A lesson plan attaches to a scheme item and to the session that will deliver it. The lesson architect can draft one for you from the curriculum item, which is useful as a starting point and dangerous as a finished product — it does not know your equipment, your learners or your workplace partners. Edit what it produces.
Step 6: Teach, and Capture the Register
Navigate to Classroom → Today (or My Teaching if you are a facilitator).
Today lists the sessions running now. Capture the register in the session rather than afterwards: attendance captured from memory at the end of the week is the single most common source of an attendance record that a funder later disputes.
Step 7: Read Coverage Before It Matters
Navigate to Classroom → Coverage.
Coverage compares the scheme of work against the lessons actually delivered. Read it in week four, not in week twenty. A gap found early is a rescheduling problem; the same gap found at the end of the programme is a learner who was never taught something they are about to be assessed on.
Classroom → Support Radar is the same idea applied to people rather than content: it surfaces learners whose attendance and participation suggest they are falling out before they formally disengage.
What Good Looks Like
- Every timetabled session has a facilitator and a space
- Every scheme item has at least one lesson plan against it
- Coverage is reviewed monthly and the gaps have dates attached to them
- Registers are captured in the session, on the day
Common Mistakes
- Treating the scheduler’s output as final. It is a proposal. Review it.
- Building a scheme of work per intake. Build it per programme and reuse it; otherwise the second intake starts from nothing.
- Reading coverage at the end. By then it is a finding rather than a plan.
- Confusing class groups with cohorts. They answer different questions and both exist on purpose.