Meetings Meetings are the key aspect of any tutoring system, and with Virtual Tutor Coordinator V3.1 arranging one-on-one, lab, and note-taking sessions is easy. One-On-One: Meetings between an individual tutor and student are referred to as one-on-one meetings. You may also customize VTCV3.1 to allow one tutor to meet with more than one student at a time, if the students are tutored in the same course. One-on-one meetings can be made from a student's My Tutor CoordinatorTM page, or when a student first signs up. Under Customizations, you may choose whether or not you would like to automatically allow students to sign up for courses on their own, and set a maximum number of sessions permitted for the same course and total number of hours of tutoring they may receive without your approval. At any time you may give or take away the ability for a specific student to add new meetings. When adding a meeting, tutors will only be displayed if the following conditions hold: They tutor the requested course Their maximum number of tutoring hours has not yet been reached They are available during some times at which the student is also available For each tutor that fits the above criteria, schedule options will be given where the tutor and student are both available, broken up into 15-minute intervals. If the tutor is available but tutoring another student in the same course at the time, there will be a '*' followed by the number of meetings the tutor already has at that time. To set up a meeting, contiguous 15-minute intervals may be selected under the following conditions: As the tutor coordinator, you may choose any number of intervals, provided you do not choose so many that you pass the tutor's maximum number of hours available per week. Students will only be able to sign up for up to their maximum total number of hours. They may also be required to pick a specific number of intervals (e.g. four, for an hour), if that option is selected on the Customizations section. An option is available to view all tutors for the course, at any time. The above criteria still hold for choosing which tutors will be shown, except no consideration is given to the student's schedule. If no tutoring options are given at all, the student is marked as 'desperate' for that course. There is a section (unless the tutor selects not to see this section) on tutors' respective My Tutor Coordinator TM page where it shows them students who are marked as desperate for a course that the respective tutor tutors. A tutor may then view the student's schedule and add times to their own schedule that correspond to the student's availability. The student is then notified by an e-mail or message (or both), and the student will no longer be considered desperate. Meetings can be rescheduled for any weeks or indefinitely (if the tutor is available), by the tutor coordinator only. After meetings have been made, the tutor coordinator can adjust the schedule type for the meeting. The schedule type can be either weekly, biweekly, triweekly, or varying. If the meeting has a varying schedule type, the weeks that the meeting will occur must be selected on the Schedule Info page. On this page, the tutor coordinator can make any modifications to when the meeting will occur, and can specify when the meeting is to begin (if no starting week is selected, the default is week after the meeting is created). Students and tutors can use this page as well, but they may only select when a meeting will not occur. Meetings can be paused for any number of weeks, or indefinitely, starting from any week. Paused meetings still show up on schedules for the week, unlike meetings that are not scheduled for that week. If there will be no meetings for any given days, those days will not show up on people's tutoring schedules. Note-Taking Note-taking sessions can be set up on any number of times for each week, and can also be rescheduled, paused, etc. just like one-on-one meetings. However, students cannot change the sessions in any ways, and there can be any number of students with the same note-taking sessions. Only the tutor coordinator can create note-taking sessions, though tutors can modify the sessions. The sessions do show up on the tutors' pages as regular meetings, and under a special section on the students' pages. Labs Labs are shown on tutors' pages like one-on-one meetings and can be modified as such, but they must be created by the tutor coordinator. More information on labs. Meetings can be viewed in many different ways. More information on viewing meetings. (C) 2004 Guy Goldstein