Students working part-time in addition to studying or having little children need different options to make appointments with their teacher. The challenge is to keep the organisation simple. It is a big advantage for teachers to schedule all appointments with their students in one single tool.
Being asked for a teacher might make an appointment with a student that was not offered in one of the regular slots. Here the "volatile slots" would come in handy. The teacher could add a single slot for the appointment and reserve it for the student. Without setting it to be cancelled after being released the slot could be registered by other students. "Volatile slots" also come with the option to automatically send a reminder and with the option to cancel an appointment.
Another nice to have feature would be the possibility to offer more slots but set the number of possible appointments per day/week/month to a maximum (n slots : m appointments, n > m).
What do you think?
Regards
Peter
Hello Peter
I'm sorry, the "volatile slots" are now gone for good - and in fact, since I proposed to remove them a year and a half ago, you're the first person to ask for them. I think that few people have ever made use of them (as far as they worked in the first place).
From my personal experience in using Scheduler, there's a limit to the "one single tool" approach. There are always some special cases where I need to communicate directly by e-mail with students to make an appointment, or where I know that they need not/should not sign up for an appointment; for example, if students are ill, on a leave of absence, can't make any of the slots I offer for various reasons... I think these will always exist, and Scheduler cannot cater for all these special cases. I usually set up an appointment for these student in Scheduler once I've fixed the details with them by e-mail.
Regarding more flexibility in how many appointments a student can book, that's an interesting idea; something related has been proposed before (CONTRIB-5267). Feel free to add your views there, or to open a new feature request on the Tracker. I must say though that I'm not planning to implement this with priority; I'm not even sure what solution here would be best for most users.
Best wishes
Henning