Today I have released goal tracking in Scholaric. Scholaric has always automatically tracked total hours. This was useful for some, but users have asked for other types of tracking, such as:
- Hours in "core" subjects
- Lessons in some or all subjects or some courses
- Attendance, according to various definitions of a "day"
Today's release provides this tracking, and other capability that you can customize to track against your local homeschool regulations or personal milestones.
Definitions:
The goal is the named statistic we are tracking, such as Core Hours.
The goal metric is the unit being tracked, either hours, lessons, or days. Hour tracking sums the time entered in lessons. Lesson tracking counts the number of lessons. Day tracking counts the number of days that a threshold number of hours or lessons were met or exceeded. Day tracking is used to track attendance. For many of you, 1 complete lesson in a day is your definition of a day of attendance.
The goal target is the number of units to accomplish, in terms of the metric, such as 200 hours.
The current period is the date range you are using to track your data - either your school year, semester, or quarter, such as the 2011-2012 school year. Goals track within the current period. When the current period is switched, the goals automatically track in that period.
The goal scope limits the counting of the metric to one or more subjects or courses, such as Mathematics and Science, or can include all data.
A goal is applied to either a single student, or all students.
Goals Page:
A new goals page shows the completed, planned, and total values for each goal. The goals page allows editing of goals, creation of new goals, and deleting of existing goals. Links to the goals page have been added to the dashboard, and on the menu bar atop each page.
Primary Goal:
One goal is designated the primary goal for a student. This goal is special in that it appears in the dashboard. The primary goal is indicated by a gold star. Primary goals may not be deleted.
On the goals page (not the dashboard) the various parts of a goal can be edited:
- Edit the goal name by clicking on it
- Change the metric by clicking on it - this will allow you to change between hours, lessons, and days (attendance).
- Switch between all users and the current student by clicking on the owner
- Select a different primary goal by clicking on an unfilled star
- Finally, edit the scope of the goal by clicking on the scope definition, which by default reads "Tracking all subjects". This will allow you to track specific subjects or courses
Happy planning!
Check this out, inline menus in Mac OSX Lion
Looks a lot like menus in http://scholaric.com
"That's been one of my mantras -- focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple"
-- Steve Jobs in BusinessWeek interview
http://www.spacex.com/assets/video/spacex-rtls-green.mp4
Not sure how they plan to carry enough fuel to pull this off.
Due to your requests, Scholaric now supports sorting of courses. To reorder your courses, use the course menu in the planning grid.
Note that not all rows in the grid can be moved. Some courses appear in the grid in spite of the fact that they have not been added for a student, or have been hidden. These appear only at the bottom of the page. To move these stray courses, first add them back in for the student.
The sort order impacts both the planning grid and the printout page. Enjoy.
Bloggers:
Thanks to those of you who have reviewed Scholaric. The Scholaric badge is up and available for you to place on your blog, to help promote Scholaric.
The badge is 125x125 and features our soon-coming logo:
The markup for the badge is as follows:
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