Rolling intakes: scheduling students who join mid-cycle

The problem with continuous intakes

Many career colleges don't start a new class every few months. A program runs as a continuous cycle — module 1 through the last module, then back to module 1 — and new students join whenever they are ready. That is good for enrolment and hard for scheduling: a student who starts in October doesn't begin at module 1, and their theory end date, practicum dates and program end date all depend on exactly where the class is when they arrive.

Schedules built by hand in a spreadsheet drift. Each one counts holidays and breaks slightly differently, the student compares theirs with a classmate's, and the office spends the week answering questions about dates.

What an accurate schedule has to account for

• The day the current cycle began module 1 — every date is counted from it.
• The number of class days each module takes, which comes from its hours and the length of a class day.
• Which days classes run: weekdays for day classes, and often Saturdays too for evening classes.
• Statutory and civic holidays, and college breaks such as the winter closure, which push class days later without removing any.
• The module in progress on the start date, the modules after it, then the modules the student missed from the next cycle.
• The practicum, which starts after the student's last module, and statutory holidays during placement that follow the employer's calendar rather than the college's.

Protecting instructional hours

The one thing a schedule must never do is quietly cut teaching time. If a holiday or break falls inside a module, the module has to finish later, not shorter; every student has to receive every class day their program requires, however their dates fall.

How Cohort builds rolling schedules

In Cohort you set, once per program, the class days for each course and the date the current cycle began module 1. For any student start date, Cohort then lays out their schedule: the module the class is on that day, the rest of the cycle, the modules they missed, and their practicum — skipping weekends, holidays and college breaks and never shortening a module. The schedule shows the program's own module numbers, prints as a handout named for the program and start date, and appears in the student's portal with the same dates the office sees.

If you are moving from spreadsheets, compare a few students' dates side by side first. Differences usually come from one assumption — the cycle start date, how a break was counted, or the class days entered for a module — and are quick to settle once they're visible.

How to do it in Cohort

• Rolling intakes — students joining mid-cycle
• Build and print a class schedule
• Holidays and college breaks on schedules