Option to migrate lessons forward

In an update, can you add a question box that asks if you would like to migrate the lessons forward for certain lessons? For instance, currently, if I add in a Ward Conference event, I have to go into several different lesson areas to migrate the lessons forward by one. The only ones I wouldn't have to move forward would be priesthood, young women, and relief society lesson groups. I would have to move all primary, sunday school and youth sunday school lessons forward by one week. A tedious and time consuming process, whereas having a box appear allowing which classes should be migrated forward would be faster and easier.

This would also help with the schedule due to General Conference. Even better would be that the schedule auto accounted for General Conference.

james34 wrote:This would also help with the schedule due to General Conference. Even better would be that the schedule auto accounted for General Conference.

I have to agree. The auto populate is of little use because as soon as you add in General and State Conferences most of the year is off and has to be reentered. For it to be useful we need to be able to enter events for the class before the auto-populate occurs.

I would agree that migrating lessons forward would be a good feature as described by mlhstheaterguy. However, the implementation has to consider all possible scenarios. Therefore I don't think the auto adjustment offered by james34would provide adequate flexibility for possible stake/ward desired handling of interrupting events. I also don't think it is necessary to enter events before the lesson schedule is populated as eblood66envisions. This would not take into consideration unplanned events such as short notice area authority visits.

A programming solution would have to consider several scenarios for schedule adjustments. One scenario is the stake/ward wants to push out lessons interrupted by an event, such as general conference, such that no lesson is lost. The sequence of lessons is uninterrupted. Another scenario is the stake/ward wants to skip the lesson that would have taken place on the date of the event. Yet another scenario is similar to the second scenario except the preempted lesson is moved to another date out of sequence, such as for a Relief Society/Priesthood first Sunday lesson.

Having these different scenarios precludes an automated adjustment for an event. Rather the option to adjust for the various scenarios in a manner other than manual editing after the point of the first event that disrupts the lesson schedule is preferred. All the scenarios I described can be handled either for the situation where the event is created before the schedule of lessons is populated or after the event(s) is(are) created.

It may be possible to to handle the solution as a conflict that requires user direction at the time the event is created or when the schedule is created on top of the event(s) (schedule created after events are created). In either case the user is asked which of three options is desired (possibly two options depending on how the third option is handled in programming). This is similar to mlhstheaterguy's solution. The first option is to adjust lesson dates without an interruption or loss of lessons. In other words the lesson displaced occurs the following week without a disruption in the sequence. The second option is to replace the lesson with the event. The third option is to replace the lesson with the event but ask the user to designate an alternate date for the displaced lesson. This scenario could treat the displaced lesson as a lesson schedule event.

jdlessley wrote:I would agree that migrating lessons forward would be a good feature as described by mlhstheaterguy. However, the implementation has to consider all possible scenarios. Therefore I don't think the auto adjustment offered by james34would provide adequate flexibility for possible stake/ward desired handling of interrupting events. I also don't think it is necessary to enter events before the lesson schedule is populated as eblood66envisions. This would not take into consideration unplanned events such as short notice area authority visits.

Oh, I agree that something like you describe would be best. But, based on comments about the schedule from the developers, I am skeptical that such a complicated feature is likely to be added in version 1.0 (although I'm sure they plan on something like it for a later release).

However, I would hope they can figure out something simpler that could be added in 1.0 that would make the auto-populate feature they recently added (and already spent time on) actually useful. Right now, it's never useful after March (because April conference will affect every class, every year). In my stake it is only useful for the first three weeks of the year because we have a late January Stake Conference most years.

If they could either allow events to apply to classes that haven't been created yet (by making the 'All' button 'sticky' and not just a short-cut for selecting all current classes) or allow you to apply the auto-populate after the class has been created (maybe a button that applies auto-populate to the days without a lesson) then the auto-populate would be useful in more situations. The second option would probably be more useful than the first.

jdlessley wrote: A programming solution would have to consider several scenarios for schedule adjustments. One scenario is the stake/ward wants to push out lessons interrupted by an event, such as general conference, such that no lesson is lost. The sequence of lessons is uninterrupted. Another scenario is the stake/ward wants to skip the lesson that would have taken place on the date of the event. Yet another scenario is similar to the second scenario except the preempted lesson is moved to another date out of sequence, such as for a Relief Society/Priesthood first Sunday lesson.

It seems simpler to me to just manually account for the second scenario. Deleted it and add it back in on the desired date if it is to be retaught. You are at that point changing the schedule and not shifting it.

james34 wrote:It seems simpler to me to just manually account for the second scenario. Deleted it and add it back in on the desired date if it is to be retaught. You are at that point changing the schedule and not shifting it.

I would agree if that was the only scenario the program would encounter. How is the program to know the difference between scenario one and scenario two? Programming the most likely scenarios at once with a user prompt for input or direction can accommodate the various scenarios.

jdlessley wrote:A programming solution would have to consider several scenarios for schedule adjustments. One scenario is the stake/ward wants to push out lessons interrupted by an event, such as general conference, such that no lesson is lost. The sequence of lessons is uninterrupted. Another scenario is the stake/ward wants to skip the lesson that would have taken place on the date of the event. Yet another scenario is similar to the second scenario except the preempted lesson is moved to another date out of sequence, such as for a Relief Society/Priesthood first Sunday lesson.

Thank you for pointing out the other two scenarios. I hadn't thought about those. Ideally, an addition to the programming when adding an event and giving the user a choice would not be much different from changing the dates only to changing what date the lesson goes to. In effect, the amount of time spent on programming the option in would be about the same and would be better adding it all in at once than adding one function in and then going back to re-program another similar function at a later date. I do know that having this function will make things easier for the end user, having to use less time changing lessons in individual classes, and more time for updating calendars and announcements.

Thanks for the communications, Bretheren. I really do hope this can be made a reality with the lesson schedule. I have many of the members of my ward use the old lesson assignments and do not hesitate when I "lack in my calling."

I hope I'm not doing something wrong, but even when I create an event before creating the class, create the class, and assign lesson material to it, the lessons still do not migrate forward. According to the things I have tried, I would still have to manually migrate each lesson forward for each class entered, regardless if the event was added before or after creating the class. I thought the lessons would migrate forward if you created an event before creating the class. Has anyone else had this same problem?