Auto-populate lesson schedules

When creating a new class, there should be a way to auto-populate all the lesson schedules. For example, if I create a new Gospel Doctrine class, I should be able to select which week lesson 1 falls on, and then all the following weeks automatically fill in.

Along the same lines, if I insert a new event (Ward Conference, etc.), I should have the option to bump everything down a week. It should still let me just replace lessons as well.

I second the motion. There are still unforseen things that can disrupt the schedule later this year, like a ward boundary change. What if the Brigham City temple dedication replaces all meetings on a Sunday this year? We still don't know when that will happen.

I third heartily agree with this suggestion. As a brand new Sunday School president it was tough for me to figure out what manual my teachers should be teaching from, what lesson they "should" be on if a class was started in the middle of the year and so on.

I would like the schedule to be auto-populated with the Church's suggested lesson plan for each class which I (or my teachers) can adjust to fit our personal ward/branch schedule.

I would suggest that a 'getting started' wizard maybe a good idea, where you get the choice to auto fill things like General Conference dates, options to add in Stake Conference and the ability to define which class occurs on certain weeks.

This is a great idea and a well implemented start though, thanks for your work.

I would also like to see that it can detect that if I change a class from lesson 10 to lesson 9 or vice versa that the rest of the year will follow along.

rgisraelsen wrote:When creating a new class, there should be a way to auto-populate all the lesson schedules. For example, if I create a new Gospel Doctrine class, I should be able to select which week lesson 1 falls on, and then all the following weeks automatically fill in.

Along the same lines, if I insert a new event (Ward Conference, etc.), I should have the option to bump everything down a week. It should still let me just replace lessons as well.

The auto-creation of the basic classes/lessons will be available when we next update the beta environment.

As far as automatically updating the other lessons when you change one, that is a bit more complicated and won't be a part of the 1.0 release. But we agree that it would be a great feature.

jdcr256 wrote:As far as automatically updating the other lessons when you change one, that is a bit more complicated and won't be a part of the 1.0 release. But we agree that it would be a great feature.

The problem is to determine when should work and when to leave things alone. A feature that changes everything based on touching a single lesson could be a source of great frustration.

RussellHltn wrote:The problem is to determine when should work and when to leave things alone. A feature that changes everything based on touching a single lesson could be a source of great frustration.

That's true, if it did something like by default it could be problematic. But it should still be an option - so when I don't want anything else to change, I can change just that week. When I want to bump everything down a week, I can do that to.

It would be nice to have an option of whether to auto-populate or not. It was a little frustrating to have everything automatically populated when the Scheduler was released (prior to me entering relevant events). Although this may not be a problem for future classes created.

jdcr256 wrote: As far as automatically updating the other lessons when you change one, that is a bit more complicated and won't be a part of the 1.0 release. But we agree that it would be a great feature.

For example, the Sunday School Gospel Doctrine schedule has all of December blank because general conference and stake conference aren't accounted for. Although the proposed feature isn't available in 1.0, any idea when it will be available?

If you have created your events first, then the lessons will automatically adjust to fill in the rest of the year. Yes, I certainly understand the irony of creating the events after all the classes have automatically been created when the first user logs in.

The procedure to get classes to automatically allow for events would be:

- Log in (which automatically creates all the classes with their lessons)
- Create your events
- Delete the classes you want to use and re-create them

Now, before you point out the problems in the above steps, know that we decided to keep the initial auto-generation so there would be something interesting to look at when members first log in. If an admin needs to touch the app before anything interesting happens for members, then they are likely to visit the app, notice that it is not being used, and never come back. Now when they visit, they can see how the app is supposed to work, and hopefully engage their ward admins to do something about it.

It means admins need to do a little more work for the initial setup to get everything right, but it's the compromise we made until we can get a little more time to improve the setup wizard.

jdcr256 wrote:Now when they visit, they can see how the app is supposed to work, and hopefully engage their ward admins to do something about it.

Is there something that tells them "this is how it will look when a admin sets it up" rather then having them finding out it's all wrong and never coming back? Otherwise, the cure may be worse then the disease since it may be harder to gain their trust then to let them know it's now in use.

I wonder if there is a chance to auto-populate the schedule of one class according to the schedule of another. I mean, to have the chance to make a change in one class (e.g. RS) and have that change automatically duplicated into the other classe (e.g. HP/EQ).

Using a unique schedule wouldn't work, since our branch presidency decides the lessons for each fourth week, but the first week is up to the single organization.