Section does not account for meeting multiple times

The following emails were submitted by Pearson -

Yes, I would appreciate the request being made, to address both issues:

Sections that meet during more than one period
Timetable Day identification for Section records

I imagine the difficulty with multiple period references in a section is that ClassPeriod is one of the PK identifiers of a section in the Ed-Fi model. Currently we are using the first period that a section meets as its published ClassPeriod. This adequately specifies the section, but if a downstream process were to use the uploaded data to generate time data, e.g. minutes in class, the value would be incorrect. This is a general issue that applies to many states, not just Arizona.

Perhaps a new optional element, MeetingTimeReference (0-many) could be added that would include BellScheduleName, ClassPeriodName, possibly TimetableDay (AlternateDayName) for linking the section directly to one or more MeetingTimes within a specific BellSchedule. At this point I haven't seen a way to accomplish this without some such additional link.

So yes, I would like a request made to Ed-Fi, but I'm not requesting a specific change (e.g. allow multiple period references in a section). Instead I'm requesting a general solution to the problem of adequately linking sections to their respective meeting time(s) within the correct bell schedule.

Thanks,

Jim.

James Robertson

A related issue is that many schools are set up with A and B days, and there isn't anything in Section to specify which cycle days relate to the section. AZ has an extension, TimeTableDayIdentifier for this purpose, but this needs to be addressed for other states as well.

The xsd (and database) currently provides for only one ClassPeriodReference in a Section entity. But it sometimes happens that a course section spans multiple class periods. These may vary by cycle day and are not necessarily contiguous (though all the cases I know of are contiguous). Could the xsd and database be modified to allow multiple ClassPeriodReferences within one Section record? While we can take various approaches at a work-around, it seems better to modify the model to reflect the real-world scenario.