Lesson Planners (also called as Course Planners or Academic Planners) allow faculty to plan the topics to be taught in each session available to them during the semester for a course/subject. Lesson Plans are also important academic artifacts to be maintained by academic teaching staff for each of their courses.

The plans, when reviewed against the actual topics being taught during a class allow a department head to gauge the level of adherence to the plan.

In onEdu, we have a concept of Master Lesson Plan. It is an approved template for each course that can be adopted by the faculty and modified to their needs. Master Lesson Plans become an asset of the organisation that can be used as a guideline for new faculty teaching a course for the first time.

The following setup and configurations are a pre-requisite to starting this process:

1. Scheme of subjects
2. Faculty are assigned to the subjects/sections
3. # of sessions for each subject is defined on the scheme of subjects

There are essentially 5 steps to this process before reports can be generated for analysis.

1. Create new master lesson planner and submit for approval
2. Approve master lesson planners
3. Create lesson planners
4. Enter Attendance
5. Review Lesson Planners (planned vs actual for a subject)
6. Review MIS report (planned vs actual for a day)

This feature can be accessed by either a faculty that has been assigned the subject in scheme of subjects for a section, or by anyone with a System Admin role.

Menu path: Academics → Master Lesson Planner

Click on Create New button on the top right of screen to start creating a new Master Lesson Planner. The number of sessions populated here based on the number of sessions defined for the Subject in Master Subjects. It does not depend on the number of sessions defined in the Scheme of Instructions.

You will be able to select a Unit (or Module) and a planned topic for each session. You may save your work partially (for a few sessions) and come back at a later time to complete the Master Lesson Planner. Once done, you may submit it for Approval by the department head (the role that approves is a configuration setting that can be changed depending on the needs of the Institution)

A Master Lesson Planner can be used by any number of faculty only after it has been approved for use by the department head. Faculty that has developed the Master Lesson Planner may submit the plan for approval once they are satisfied by it.

Menu Path: Academics → Master Lesson Planner

Approval of Master Lesson Planners is enabled for specific roles in onEdu by a configuration setting.

Search for the subject by department and name. If it is in 'Yet to Publish' status, it can be approved. Open the Master Lesson Planner by clicking on the name of the subject, and scroll to the bottom of the screen to click on Approve button.

This action will approve the Master Lesson Planner. Any further edits to the Master Lesson Planner will invalidate the approval and it has to be approved yet again by the department head. Approved Master Lesson Planners become templates that can be reused/copied by any number of faculty teaching this course/subject in the future.

In onEdu, faculty are ultimately responsible for their lesson plans. While Master Lesson Plans can be used as a starting point, faculty has the ability to overwrite and change the default copy of Master Lesson Planner.

Menu Path: Academics → Lesson Planner

When faculty navigates to this screen, they are presented with multiple folders, one for each course they are responsible for. Each folder is clickable. When clicked, the current lesson plan for the course/subject is displayed in an edit mode on first entry. Master Lesson Planner is pre-populated by default here. Faculty can choose to change the default Master Lesson Plan and update it at their discretion.

The Green folders represent courses/subjects where attendance has already been entered. The red folders represent courses/subjects where attendance has not been entered. As long as attendance has not been entered for a session, its lesson plan is editable. But once, attendance has been entered for a subject for a session, then lesson planner cannot be edited for that session.

One session at a time has to be edited and saved.

With Step 3, creation of lesson plans is complete. It is recommended that lesson plans be documented and approved before the beginning of class work.

When entering attendance, faculty will be presented with planned unit and the topic. This defaults based on the session number of the class. Faculty can choose to change it in case the topic covered in the class differs from the plan.

Saving the actual topic when entering the attendance makes it easy for comparison with the plan.

There are two reports that help faculty and department heads review progress of classes and take corrective actions.

1. Lesson Planner
2. MIS Report

Faculty can navigate to Lesson Planner and view a comparison of planned vs actual lesson plans. Date of actual session is also presented on this report. All past classes are not editable, and future classes that do not have an attendance entered yet can be edited.

Faculty can choose to plan for a few classes at a time and update the lesson plan periodically for the next unit/module.

MIS Report displays the classes conducted on a give date, along with the planned vs actual topics covered in those classes. A department filter is available to filter the information for a specific department.