Publishing
Online meeting links, resolved in one place
Hybrid teaching turns where is my class into a URL. Three different people in an institution will want that URL stored in three different places — and all three are right, for their own programme.
Three places an address can live
A lesson can carry the address of an online meeting in three places, and each of them answers a different question about how the institution teaches.
- On the room — this room is a permanent online space. A room that is really a standing Teams meeting, used by whatever is scheduled into it.
- On the subject — this course has its own meeting. One address for every occurrence, all term. This is what most institutions use.
- On the single lesson — this class is somewhere else. A replacement session, a guest speaker's own room, one week moved online while a building is closed.
Which one wins is your house rule, not ours
When a lesson carries more than one of them, the sources are tried in order and the first that has an address is used. The default order is the lesson's own address, then the subject's, then the room's — and a source with no address is simply skipped, so an institution that has never used a per-lesson address sees no change from it.
An institution that teaches in permanent online rooms wants the opposite, and inverts it for the whole institution in one setting: room, then subject, then lesson.
And then there is the case that made this configurable. Faculties disagree about it inside one institution: a programme taught in permanent Teams rooms wants the room to win, while a programme that gives every course its own meeting wants the course to win. Neither is wrong, so the order is set per programme — one line naming the programme and the sources in the order they are to be tried. Naming fewer than three is legal and means the ones left out are never used at all.
One lesson can serve groups from several programmes, and there is no correct answer when their rules differ. The tie is broken by the order the institution wrote them in: the first rule whose programme this lesson serves wins. Writing the more specific programme first is how a school says this one, whatever else the lesson also serves.
Resolved once, published everywhere
The order is worked out in one place and used by everything that publishes, so the four channels cannot drift apart:
- the timetable reports exported as PDF, and the PDF the mailing server sends with a schedule
- the CSV export
- the iCalendar feed and calendar subscriptions
- the web timetable and the iOS and Android apps, which read the institution's own order rather than a copy of it
Two small decisions worth knowing about
A printed schedule writes the address out in full rather than showing an icon, because a printed timetable that says online and nothing else is a timetable somebody has to ask about.
And the address is never upper-cased, even in the all-capitals report some institutions print. Everything after the host name in a URL is case sensitive, so an upper-cased meeting address is a different address — and a printed one gets retyped by hand, which is the whole reason it is on paper.
Download the manual
- Online meeting links (PDF, 6 pages)Where each address is set, the exact syntax of the per-programme order, what happens to a typo in it, where the resolved address appears, and a troubleshooting table. Free, and no form to fill in.
- Why the link belongs on the timetableThe argument for holding the meeting address where the class is, rather than in an email sent in week one.
See Wise Timetable on your own data
Book a 45-minute online presentation. We will walk through your institution's scheduling problem, show how Wise Timetable handles it, and answer anything your team wants to test.