Lesson series are generated in the background.  You will see your dialog will close near immediately, and a quick notice will flash over the course, telling you that the work has started.

Update Oct 2019 - this is back to the foregorund due go delays in starting up background jobs.

In a few seconds you should see an alert, telling you the work is complete, and your row will update automatically:

The alert has some important information:

• How many lessons were created
• Date of the end of the series
• A button to jump to the end of the series
• An x icon to dismiss the alert

Background generation helps with overall system performance, and is enabled for series creation and updates.

Happy Planning 

To add courses to students, click on the courses label in top-left corner of the planning grid:

or select add from the courses menu.

This brings up the Add Course dialog:

Note: for new students, the dialog pops up automatically.

To add a course, take these three steps:

1. Enter a course name and a subject name.  Scholaric will try to match existing courses and subjects for you automatically.  If it does find a match, you can select these names from a drop-down menu.
2. If you'd like to add the course to multiple students, check the checkbox next to their names.  The student whose grid is displayed is automatically checked and disabled - to force that student to get the course.
3. Finally, hit the Add button in the lower right corner of the dialog.

Hitting add performs a number of actions for you, including:

1. Create the course, if it does not exist; otherwise, find the existing course by name.  If the course does exist, the entered subject name is ignored. 
2. Create the subject, if it does not exist; otherwise, find the existing subject by name.
3. Add the course to each of the selected students.
   

The new course is then displayed and highlighted for you, and a message indicating the results is displayed in the dialog.

Note: the dialog remains open so that multiple actions can be taken quickly.

At the Midwest Parent Educators Conference, Scholaric was put to the test.  A new user signed up, set up a course and wanted help entering a complex repeating lesson.  It is a useful case study to explain what Scholaric can do, and how to go about analyzing.

The facts have been changed to protect the innocent...

"My Math program has 25 lessons, each of which are divided into 6 parts, a, through f..."

Okay, no problem Scholaric handles that.

"...but we do 2 parts per day..."

Sure, Scholaric does that too.

"...AND we are on lesson 7, and have already done parts a and b of it..."

That's a lot to consume, but we want to generate

Lesson 7 parts c-d
Lesson 7 parts e-f
Lesson 8 parts a-b
Lesson 8 parts c-d
Lesson 8 parts e-f
Lesson 9 parts a-b
Lesson 9 parts c-d
Lesson 9 parts e-f
...

and so on.  

Breaking this down, it first is a nested sequence, an outer numeric sequence {7-25} and an inner alphabetic sequence {a-f}:

Lesson {7-25} parts {a-f}

But that would be one part per day.  To do 2 parts per day, we need to use the group operator * (increment it two times per day):

Lesson {7-25} parts {a-f*2}

Some changes to the navigation menus are here, in part to make room for transcripts.  The old menus looked like this:

The new menus look like this:

The changes are small, but significant:

• The title of Scholaric with the student's name are moved up a level
• The menu options have slid over to the left
• The current page is indicated with a white underline 
• The switch-student menu is moved into the navigation area on all screens
• Clicking on the student's name activates the switch-student menu

It is still the case that clicking on Scholaric takes you to the dashboard.

Scholaric offers two group-weighted grade formulas:

• Group-point weighted - a grade is calculated from a set of weighted lesson groups,  which themselves will be graded by a point-weighted formula.
• Group-equal weighted - a grade is calculated from a set of weighted lesson groups,  which themselves will be graded by an equal-weighted formula. 

In short, each group is scored, and the grade is a weighted average of the groups.  The difference between the two is how the score for the group is calculated.  

For example, for Astronomy, you may specify these groups:

• lessons: 30%
• tests: 50%
• observations 20%.

Group-Weighted Grading Terms

Below, the following terms are used:

• Group-weighted Grade Type is a grade type which uses group-weighted grading.
• Lesson Group is a name given to a group of lessons which will be graded as a whole and assigned a weight.
• Weight is the value that a group is given, determining how much of an impact a group has on the final score.

Setup of Groups and Weights

These group-weighted grade types require an extra step of setup - defining the lesson groups for a course and their respective weights. This can be done for any course using either group-point weighted or group-equal weighted grade types.  First, you must make the course use that grade type:

Note that a menu to change grade type now appears on the course menu in the planning grid. Once the course uses a group-weighted grade type, the menu changes, allowing you to edit the group weights:

The report card has this capability as well, but in either case, the course must have a group-weighted grade type.

Clicking on this brings up a new dialog:

The dialog shows all of the groups you have created, and creates one named Lessons if you have not created any.  For each group, you must supply a name, a weight, and indicate if it is the default group.

The weights must add up to 100%, or the displayed total will turn red and updates will be disallowed.  The picture also has a red weight for the default group, because the default group cannot have a zero weight.

To set the weight of existing groups, just enter the weight.  To add a new group, like Observations in the example, click the Add Group button.

With all groups weighted correctly, the last thing to do is select a proper default group.  With all this done, click the Update button.

Deleting a weight

When editing existing weights, the Delete button is enabled.  Clicking this resets the group's weight value to zero.  The weight will be deleted on the next update.

If there are no other courses using that group, and no lessons referencing the group, the group is deleted as well.

Assigning a Group to a Lesson

With the group weights set up, you can assign lessons to their groups.  For a group weighted course only, the lesson dialog shows a group field:

The selection control displays only the groups which have a weight for the course in the current period.  Scholaric automatically selects the group you labeled as default for this course.

Happy Planning

The grade type unweighted will be renamed to equal-weighted in the coming release.

This is more clear of a name for how the formula works - each lesson is weighted equally.

Video tutorial about creating lessons

I have just released Scholaric with a new lesson planning feature that I call splitting and grouping.

Scholaric now supports additional lesson sequences.

In addition to numeric ranges like this:

Lesson {1-10}

You can now use alphabetic ranges as well:

Section {A-G}

lower case works too:

Parts {a-d}

Some of our series have two sequences nested inside each other, like a letter (a-c) within a number (1-5)

Lesson 1 Part a
Lesson 1 Part b
Lesson 1 Part c
Lesson 2 Part a
Lesson 2 Part b
Lesson 2 Part c
Lesson 3 Part a
Lesson 3 Part b
Lesson 3 Part c
Lesson 3 Part a
...

To do this use

Lesson {1-10} Part {a-c}

These nested sequences introduce a new problem. For the above example, if you needed to continue (say you had limit of 10 lessons set), you will need to start the numeric (outer) range at 3, and the inner (alphabetic) range at b. But, the range of {b-c} applies only to the first sub-range for the rest, it needs to revert back to the full {a-c}, or you will skip Lesson 4 Part a.

We need a new syntax to cover this case. This is called seeding, which starts your inner series at a point other than the first value in the range.

Seeding is set by following your range with a colon and the seed value.

Lesson {3-10} Part {a-c:b}

This inner seeded sequence is b-c for Lesson 3, a-c for the rest.

Happy Planning

New this morning, you can print the Scholaric grid.