Intended audience: Schedulers
Context: This article describes an approach to building timetables in aSc, which provides the most direct way to integrate with ManageBac+. In this way, one can export the generated timetable such that corresponds 1:1 across both platforms.
Please note: This approach requires planning ahead of time. If you have already built a schedule in aSc and want to convert it to ManageBac+'s schedule, please use this guide instead.
Please note, you will have already imported classes with IDs and levels at this point. The next step is getting the ManageBac+ timetable import format, which relies heavily on the class ID:
The overall approach:
When doing the data entry into ASC of the teachers and classes, ASC needs you to enter Subjects, Classes, Divisions, Lessons, and (optionally) Classrooms. What do they correspond to in ManageBac+?
Drilling down, you may notice that Classes in ASC refers to Year Groups in ManageBac+. This is an essential difference between the two data models. The step below that, though, Divisions, is where the scheduling happens.
Above demonstrates where Language Acquisition classes, Chinese and Spanish, occur at the same time. There are two different teachers for those sections, and they should be scheduled at the same time. The process to create them are as follows:
This communicates to ASC that the English classes will occur at the same time and will export a ManageBac+ class for each, and there are two ToK classes, happening at the same time, and will export two ManageBac+ class IDs. In addition, Maths HL will occur during Chinese SL and Spanish SL time, and the the remaining Chinese and Spanish SL / HL lessons will occur at the same (but not at the same time as when Math HL meets!)
In addition to this, however, you also need to determine the Lessons, which tells ASC how often they can meet. Twice a rotation? You need to use Lessons to do that. In the case of the Math HL and Chinese/Spanish lessons, that should probably be one lesson. The other row with Chinese and Spanish HL and SL, will probably be three lessons.
Please note that simply defining Divisions in ASC is not the end of the story. The program also needs to have teachers assigned to the respective division such that it doesn't create a conflict. The Lessons also need to match teacher assignments order to build the timetable.
Link to ManageBac+ classes
Each of the division names should be the class ID of the target ManageBac+ class. When you go to export it, via the "Export as XML" feature (which requires additional license) these division names will be associated with which day/period it is scheduled for.
If the class IDs in the divisions match the ManageBac+ uniq class IDs, then associating the exported timetable will be vastly simplified.
Building the Timetable
Please use ASC support to understand the nuances of the process of actually building it. From MB's perspective, all you need to do is ensure that the timetable has been built to your specifications. Please note that student's timetable will be populated by enrollments into classes.
Matching the Data
Once you understand how the data entry goes, and how to build the timetable, let's look at how MB can read the information. ManageBac+ needs the period information matched to the Class ID. If the Divisions in ASC match the class IDs in ManageBac+, and you can export to XML, then you can use the asc2mb command line tool to convert the XML export into ManageBac+ CSV.
The command line tool assumes some knowledge of how to use the terminal.