School event with multiple classes

[sfsnow]

Newbie here and, as always, apologies if I did not search enough to find the answer to my question. I administer a youth skiing school that runs over a couple of months with approx 300 students and 20-30 classes. Students are assigned to classes based on their expertise. There is a significant amount of shifting among classes, especially in the early sessions, because students are too high or too low for their skills or the improve and can move up a level. I have created an event for the entire program and want to track the class assignments of the individual students during the program. (I will also track instructor assignments.) It doesn't seem wise to create an event for each class so I am looking for a best practice solution to this tracking problem. Would groups be the way to go? (One more detail: I need to keep a record of their previous class assignment in the event they change classes or there is a change in instructors for historical and liability reasons.)

Thanks.

Don

[petednz]

Hey Don

One option would be to create the 'class' as a new Contact Type (sub type of Organisation)

and then use 'Relationships'

This will give you the history of people changing from class to class.

But being on WP means I can't also spell out the goodies of webform as a nicer way of managing such changes.

Using Relationships also means it is easy if later on you want to user multi-tier Permissions to let the class instructors have access to student details - but only students that they are teaching

[sfsnow]

Thanks, Pete. So, there's a contact called Class1 as an Organization type with student_in and class_of relationships for the student and teacher_in and class_by for the instructor, or some more elegant terms?

I wanted to move from WP to Drupal but need to get the CiviCRM environment built first--this season approaching rapidly so no time for major conversions.

Don

[petednz]

So, there's a contact called Class1 as an Organization type with student_in and class_of relationships for the student and teacher_in and class_by for the instructor, or some more elegant terms?

Yep make something like that.

I wanted to move from WP to Drupal but need to get the CiviCRM environment built first--this season approaching rapidly so no time for major conversions.

Could you work with a drupal front end for civi that looks same, but keep all your content in WP for meantime??

[sfsnow]

That's probably a wise approach. I've held back because of the general Drupal learning curve. Spent a fair amount of time looking at OG (the web site has a private section for instructors) and liked its (theoretical) integration with CiviCRM but had some learning curve issues with user posts, etc. and ran out of time. I'm working on a test bed right now and could certainly use your idea with no real cost. Thanks again.

Don

[petednz]

Yes OG has a bit of a learning curve but the basics are pretty straightforward - let me know if you need some more info on how to get OG's autopopulating from civi - assuming that the out-of-the-box synch doesn't do the necessary

[sfsnow]

Yes OG has a bit of a learning curve but the basics are pretty straightforward - let me know if you need some more info on how to get OG's autopopulating from civi - assuming that the out-of-the-box synch doesn't do the necessary

Please stop me if I'm crossing a line between forum advice and professional consultation. One reason I deferred Drupal was not understanding how OG users would post content to the instructors-only portion of the website. I saw a very complex form that, among other things, required them to select between the public (aka marketing) portion of the website and the private, instructors-only portion. I fear most instructors look for a Facebook style interface that requires no technical knowledge. I'm sure that when I get time to dig deeper I'll find that I was wrong. In the meantime, is it possible to make the user interface utterly simple? (Not asking for a how-to, just reassurance.)

Don

[sfsnow]

Continuing to mull this problem. I liked the idea of creating classes as contacts of type organization but it appears I can't nest the class/organization so I end up with a flat list of 30+ organizations for each year of the program. That's essentially the same problem as using events and I'd like to see a more organized (read that, nested) approach. Please comment if I am missing something.

An alternative I've just begun to consider is using CiviCASE for the classes. (I should post to that forum but I wanted to raise the idea here before moving there.) It's a kludge and may not work but it appears to have a few advantages, esp. in its ability to track involvement of different players (students parents and instructors in my case) and have a calendar or schedule. Any thoughts?

Thanks ver much for anyone's advice or comments.

Don

[Michael McAndrew]

Please stop me if I'm crossing a line between forum advice and professional consultation.

IMO there is no line If people have the time and inclination to help, they will. If they don't they don't, but that is OK

is it possible to make the user interface utterly simple?

Utterly simple, probably not, but drupal tends to be pretty good in its ability to simplify things.  Since utterly simple is subjective, it is hard to know. I suspect the only way you will find out is through investing some time in it.

Org types and relationships seems like an OK way to go. Not sure exactly what you mean by nested but maybe if you explain the weakness in a bit more detail, it might become obvious.  What would be the problem? Could you reuse the classes next year? Would it begin to look messy?

Not sure case is going to solve all your problems.  I think what you may find is any approach will have its downsides (to put it another way, we don't have a component called CiviClass) so you should probably bare that in mind, i.e. don't aim for perfection - aim to good enough and you can improve with each season.

Michael

[sfsnow]

Please stop me if I'm crossing a line between forum advice and professional consultation.

IMO there is no line If people have the time and inclination to help, they will. If they don't they don't, but that is OK

is it possible to make the user interface utterly simple?

Utterly simple, probably not, but drupal tends to be pretty good in its ability to simplify things.  Since utterly simple is subjective, it is hard to know. I suspect the only way you will find out is through investing some time in it.

Org types and relationships seems like an OK way to go. Not sure exactly what you mean by nested but maybe if you explain the weakness in a bit more detail, it might become obvious.  What would be the problem? Could you reuse the classes next year? Would it begin to look messy?

Not sure case is going to solve all your problems.  I think what you may find is any approach will have its downsides (to put it another way, we don't have a component called CiviClass) so you should probably bare that in mind, i.e. don't aim for perfection - aim to good enough and you can improve with each season.

Michael

Well said (and appreciated), Michael.

First, wrt Drupal. My comment comes from not being able to simplify the posting process for users. My folks are ski instructors. Some are computer-literate but they all prefer the snow to the keyboard. Specifically, the OG post screen (as well as other content-authoring screens) requires the author to remember to scroll down to a field to choose where to place the post; i.e., public or group. Not going to happen with my folks and their words of wisdom will land on the public site since that seems to be the default.

Regarding org types and relationships. I like the idea. I've been comparing this approach to Groups, which I'm learning aren't very flexible and have been playing with Tags, which can capture a lot of the detail we track for our students. Time is moving on, though, and I'll be processing 2015 registrations shortly so I need to move beyond the exploration stage. Or, as you said . . . You're quite correct that this is a work in progress and I should live with the software, which is quite impressive, and learn as I go along. Jest get a bit pushy when I should be patient. I am enjoying the learning curve, though.

Thanks for the push back towards organizations.

Don

[Michael McAndrew]

NP.

Yes - simple for some is not so simple for others and also depends on their motivations, i.e. people are prepared to learn how to do fairly complex things in facebook since they do want the world to know what they are up to

Would be great to know how you get on - feel free to report back once you have it implemented and have some experience with the ski school

[sfsnow]

NP.

Yes - simple for some is not so simple for others and also depends on their motivations, i.e. people are prepared to learn how to do fairly complex things in facebook since they do want the world to know what they are up to

Would be great to know how you get on - feel free to report back once you have it implemented and have some experience with the ski school

Will do. Currently importing spreadsheet data for 2014 programs to organization contacts. Going well except I thought when students in and instructor for were created as relationships within the organization contact/class, a second relationship was created between the students and their teacher. Could swear I saw that when I started but it's not happening today. Too bad there's no batch relationship action beyond the add to organization. I can live with it, though. The key thing now, inanition to creating some history, is learning how to handle the incoming registrations for 2015.

Don

[Michael McAndrew]

Hey there,

You might be able to use the following 'workaround' to do what you want...

Use the importer to import extra information about already existing contacts

1. Do an export of the contacts that you want to add which contains fields that you would use to identify which extra relationships you want to add for each contact (e.g. their class)
2. Go into LibreOffice Calc / Excel and add extra columns for related contacts (probably the ID of the teacher
3. Do an import of that file, adding the relationship as you go and making sure to choose update contacts for the duplicate matching.

Hopefully that will work for you unless there are some gotchas / subtleties in your data structure that I am not getting right now.