Overview
This article provides step-by-step instructions on how department scheduler's can assign meeting patterns for their courses. These instructions discuss how to sort meeting patterns, assign multiple meeting patterns, and ignore double bookings.
Requirements
Once sections have been assigned instructors, meeting times can be assigned to sections that align with the institution’s rules and instructors’ preferences.
Instructions
You can assign Meeting Patterns manually by opening the section from within the Section Dashboard. As with instructors, there are two ways of doing so.
Step 1:
Step 2: Navigate to the “Meeting Patterns & Rooms” card.
Step 3:
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Decide whether you will be using a Standard Meeting Pattern (a standard timeblock defined by the administration) or whether you will assign a Custom timeblock.
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In most cases, we recommend using Standard Meeting Patterns to avoid warnings or violating rules.
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To toggle between Standard and Custom Meeting Patterns, you can click the blue stopwatch icon.
Step 4 (Option A - Standard Meeting Pattern):
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To assign a Standard Meeting Pattern, select the blue “+ Meeting Pattern” button to open the meeting pattern modal.
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Inside the modal, Coursedog provides an interface to select from University-approved timeblocks. Users can filter by days, times, or attributes at the top of the card or scroll through the list.
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Coursedog helps determine a preference fit that pushes potential fits to the top. “Preference Fit” is impacted by instructor preferences, instances of double bookings (i.e. either room or instructor double bookings), and usage (if a meeting pattern has high usage, its preference fit will decrease).
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Coursedog also sorts the time-blocks with the same preference fit by showing you the least used time-blocks first. This naturally nudges folks to schedule more effectively, while pushing to the top the best fits to save time.
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“Usage” refers to the number of instances of that Meeting Pattern across all sections in the institution.
Step 4 (Option B - Custom Meeting Pattern):
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To assign a Custom (Non-Standard) Meeting Pattern, you will simply input the days and times for the section.
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Using Non-Standard Meeting Patterns may result in warnings or trigger workflows, depending on your University's “Rules” settings.
Assigning Multiple Meeting Patterns
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From the “Meeting Patterns & Rooms” card, you can assign multiple meeting patterns with varying start and end dates.
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To do this, add multiple meeting patterns and then click the “Set Dates” button.
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You will then be prompted to set start and end dates for each meeting pattern.
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These dates take precedence over all dates associated with the term they are being scheduled for, so note that if they are scheduled outside of the term or part of term they are associated with, this could potentially cause issues.
Sorting Meeting Patterns
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If you are creating multiple Meeting Patterns in a single section or editing Meeting Patterns in a section with multiple Meeting Patterns – and those meeting patterns aren’t already in order – you can use the “Sort Meetings” button to sort the section’s Meeting Patterns.
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This button becomes available when multiple Meeting Patterns exist and meetings are not already sorted. Clicking it will sort Meeting Patterns first by Start Date, then by Start Time.
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Any changes to meeting order in Coursedog, whether by manually reordering or using the Sort Meetings button, can trigger an integration update so the new order is reflected in your Student Information System.
Ignoring Double Bookings
PATH: Scheduling > Section Dashboard > (Click on Section to Edit)
If settings allow, under “Set Details” you can ignore all double booking conflicts caused by a specific meeting.
