E10 - ADMIN Setup: Grid Structure

Modified on Thu, 14 Aug at 12:42 AM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preamble
Grid structure
Half day set up
- Converting a Weekly Timetable to a Fortnightly Timetable

Preamble

Setting up the grid structure for a school is of great importance and dictates the flow of the rest of the timetable. It is very important to get it right prior to timetable construction.

Grid structure

Go to Admin > Setup > Grid Structure

Setting up the Grid

Days in the cycle: Typical cycles include 1 week (5 day) cycle, 2-week (10 day) cycle. Less common are 3-week (15 day) cycle or 7-day cycle.
Days can be added to the cycle by entering a day code into the far right empty column.
Periods per day: A slot is required for each place where something will occur on the timetable. These include Teaching periods, Duty slots, Offline slots such as for Homegroup or sport periods. Lunch is often broken into two slots so that the lunch break contains two duty times.
Periods can be added to the cycle by entering a period code into the bottom empty column.
To add a new row between existing rows, use the keyboard <INSERT> key.
To delete a row, use the <DELETE> key, or clear the period name and enter. E10 will display dialog box to confirm the period is to be deleted.

The maximum number of total different periods you can have is 300. Anything over this not supported and can have consequences on other functions in E10. Schools using multi-grid will not reach this if there are similar bell times amongst the grids as they are combined on the back end when processing.

Types of Periods

Each period type is significant when timetabling and is important to understand.

Teaching period (White): Teaching periods. The white periods display in the Master grid for E10 to timetable lessons.

Offline period (Yellow): Offline periods. These slots do show on all timetables by default, but do not display in the Master grid, because they do not need to. Lessons are typically hardcoded into these slots. Examples include periods to hold 'Homegroup' type classes or duty times.
Duties can be placed into yellow slots.

Recess or Lunch (Orange): Meal break times, such as recess and lunch. E10 uses this type to understand 'Morning' and 'Afternoon' sections. When timetabling in the Master grid, there are algorithm weightings for morning and afternoon placement of classes.
Duties can be placed into orange slots.

Spacer/unused (Grey): Filler spaces. Useful if days have different numbers of periods or bell times to align the timetable views aesthetically.

Setting the period type

To change the period type for every day: right click on the period name in the grey column and select from options.

To change the type of a period on a specific day: right click on the specific period and select from options.

Period codes

Period names should be very short, and ideally just one or perhaps two characters at most. It is recommended that they should;

not have the prefix ‘P’- like P1, P2, unless required to distinguish periods across multiple grids
not be called 'Assembly'
not have slashes, hyphens or underscores such as 'Duty/RC', 'Bus_Duty'. These characters are reserved for special purposes.
be limited to three characters (but can be more)

Best practice examples:

Period codes: 0, RC, 1, 2, R, 3, 4, L1, L2, 5, 6, 7
Day codes: Mon, Wed for 1-week cycles, MonA, WedB for 2-week cycles

Best practice is to have consistent references, and as consistent a grid format as possible. Focus on numbers or two characters only. DA and DP for Duty Am or Pm if needed. Long period references cause a wide column, which reduces the font size on timetable prints. Long period names cause more confusion with variations, where slightly more cryptic 'row identifiers' lead to less confusion. Almost all end users understand the timetable grid instantly, which have recess and lunch as delineators anyway.

Other examples:

A - Assembly
RC - Roll call
H - Home group
T - Tutor
R - Recess
L1 - Lunch1
L2 - Lunch2
B - Bus duty
DA - Duty am
DP - Duty pm

Code types to avoid:
3-6AM
RC_TF
K/2R

Belltimes and Durations

Use the View filter to select to display the bell times and/or durations.

Bell times have format hh:mm-hh:mm.

The colon is used for display, but if changing the times, use a full stop for convenience eg 9.30. The full stop will be converted to a colon eg 9:30.
Overtype the existing bell times in the grey row header to update the bell times for that period on all days in the cycle (the whole row). Individual period bell times may also be edited.
The end time of one period will become the start time of the next period by default. Gaps between periods are allowed in E10 but may not be allowed in external systems that E10 is syncing to.
Period bell times need to be chronological. e.g. If period 1 comes before period 2, then the bell times for period 1 must also come before those of period 2.
Period bell times cannot overlap, except at the start or the end of the day in offline (yellow) periods.
1. Example 1 - Periods 1 and 2 cannot have overlapping bell times, otherwise there will be clashes of classes for teachers and students (using a single grid file)
2. Example 2 - A class may start before school in period 0 (yellow offline) and run from 7:40 to 8:30. A duty may run from 8:15-8:40 in period AM (yellow offline). While these 2 periods overlap by 15 minutes, they are both offline, do not appear on the Master Grid, and do not affect the timetable structure.

Durations are calculated based on the period start and end time and cannot be edited directly.

Different bell times timetable view

If there are different bell times on any day, the timetable views can only display the default times.

When viewing a timetable - year level, teacher, room or student - any periods and bell times displayed reflect the entries in the grey header column at left in Grid Structure and NOT any individual period names or times that may be different.

Periods with overlapping bell times

Teaching periods (white) cannot have overlapping bell times as this will create issues with the timetable structure. E10 allows offline periods to have overlapping bell times but note the warning below regarding Daily.

WARNING: Although E10 allows overlapping bell times in offline periods, these can cause issues in 3rd party systems and Daily where covers in periods that overlap will expand both periods. For this reason, if using Daily, it is recommended that periods do not have any overlapping bell times.

Notice below, the overlapping bell times in periods 0 and Roll, L1 and L2, and observe how in Daily, covers in these periods extend across both of the overlapping periods, even though the timetabled duty is for only 1 of those period.

Half day set up

Converting a Weekly Timetable to a Fortnightly Timetable

For files that have either a 5 day or 6 day cycle (the 6th day being on the weekend), there is a function that will convert the file to a fortnightly timetable. This is found in Setup > Grid structure as shown below.

This function will:

double the number of days in the cycle
double the number of periods for each class and the teaching load for each class, e.g. in Class data, it will change the #Per value from 8(7) to 16(14)
double the maximum load, study load, duty load, on-call load and number of RTOs for each teacher
double the number of days off and half days off for each teacher
double the full time load per cycle in Setup > School info
double the allowances allocated to teachers
create an exact replica of the Week A timetable in Week B

To complete the process, select 'Go' on the slide in panel. Note that this process can be undone using ctrl-z or by using the undo button.