Creating Sites and Rooms

The next step in setting up your onCourse program is entering sites and rooms. You can give each room a name, specific directions on how to get there, and describe the facilities that are available. It also allows you to make it possible for students to view detailed maps and instructions from your website about where their class will be held, saving your staff time with phone calls giving directions and saving students frustration when they can’t accurately locate the venue.

Creating sites and rooms is a valuable part of your training resource management. Every time you book a session in a room, the Classes timetable is updated and the room becomes scheduled. This means that if you try to book another session in this room at the same time, you will be notified that it is already booked within the Class > Timetable tab. It’s important to note that onCourse will not prevent you from double booking a room.

If you have a room or site that you hire on a casual basis you can also set the availability for it. For example, you may hire a public hall on Wednesday evenings. When you set up this room, you can specify it is only available for you to book between 5pm and 9pm. Course coordinators scheduling classes will an error message if they try to book a class in this room on another night, or to start before 5pm.

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It is a good idea to create the sites and rooms first so later when you add courses, you can easily assign them to a location.

How to set up a new site

1. From the Sites list view, click on the + button. A new site screen will open on the details window in the general section.
2. In the Name field enter the name of the site e.g. Waverley Campus. Remember the site is where the rooms are located and is not the rooms themselves, that comes later.
3. Enter the street address of the site. If you report AVETMISS your sites must have accurate address suburbs and postcodes.
4. Once you’ve entered the complete address, a Google Maps image denoting your sites location will appear if you have added the Google Maps API key.
5. Move to the Directions section.
   If you have specific driving directions, public transport directions or special instructions like parking, you can add them here. This information is published to your ish website. Because these description fields are Rich Text enabled (the blue A indicates this) you can add hyperlinks to local bus timetables or other useful pages for your students, like transport infoline or your local equivalent.
6. If you have any internal notes about the site, you can add them on the notes tab. These are not published to your ish website.
7. To set an unavailability for the site, go to the Availability Rules section and click on the + button.
8. Create a new availability rule by clicking the + and define the Start & End date and time. You can also select 'all day' instead of selecting a specific time period.
9. Choose if you wish to repeat the unavailability and the end date of the repeats. You will also need to add a description of why the resource is unavailable.
10. Click save. Once you have saved your site, click Close to be returned to the list view.

How to set up a new Room

1. From the site list, double-click on the site you want to add rooms to. Alternatively, you can open the Rooms list from the splash screen and click on the + button.
2. Enter the name of the room e.g. Studio 1. If your venue only has one room, such as a community hall, you still need to create at least one room so you can link a class to it.
3. Enter the seated capacity. This is how many people the room can hold. If you try to book a class into this room that has a maximum student number greater than the seated capacity, you will get a warning.
4. On the Direction tab you can enter the directions to the room e.g. ground floor, level 3 and the room facilities e.g. tables and chairs, screen projector.
5. If you have any internal notes about the room, you can add them on the notes tab. These are not published to your ish website.
6. To set room availability, go to the Availability Rule section and click the + button.
7. Create a new availability rule by clicking the +and define the Start and End date and time. You can also select 'all day' instead of selecting a time period.
8. Choose if you wish to repeat the unavailability and the end date of the repeats. You also need to add a description of why the resource is unavailable.
9. Click save to save the record, then click close to return to the list view.

To edit any of the information you have entered simply click on the room or site that you wish to update. This will bring up the edit screen for that record. Make your changes and click save.