The Open Classes Add-on allows you to make lessons open for students to enroll themselves.
Enabling the Add-on
Click on "Account & Settings" and then click on "Integrations & Add-ons".
Use the "Search" field and enter "Open Classes".
Click on the "Enable" link.
Settings
After enabling the add-on, click the "Manage" link to customize the add-on's settings. The settings that you can customize can be found below:
Enable Notification - When enabled, this setting will send an email notification to the company whenever a student joins a lesson.
Join Course - Enable this setting to have the option to allow students to join a course of repeating lessons (instead of joining only a single lesson).
Client Default Visibility - When enabled, open classes will be displayed by default on family & student calendars. When left unchecked, family & student calendars will only show the students' scheduled lessons only, with a filter option to also display open classes.
Cutoff Time - This setting allows you to specify the number of hours before the start of an open class when students can no longer join.
Allow Override of Cutoff Time - When scheduling lessons, this option lets you choose the override the default "Cutoff Time" and allow students to enroll up to the start of the lesson.
NOTE: The number of hours specified in this setting will be used for the "Join Classes" option in the Website Booking Plugin when that setting is enabled.
Opening a Lesson for Students to Join
When you are scheduling or editing an existing lesson, you can check the "Allow students to join lesson" checkbox under the "Open Lesson" section to create the lesson as an open lesson.
NOTE: If the software is not letting you add an open lesson without selecting a student, go to the Account Settings page and scroll down to "Calendar & Event Settings". Set the "Require a Student" setting to "Off".
Viewing Open Lessons
Both open and closed lessons are displayed by default in the company administrator, staff and teacher accounts. If you would like to filter the calendar to only display lessons that are open for students to join, can you use the filter on the right-hand side. You can also view lessons that are closed to enrollment using the filter.
In student and family accounts, open lessons are hidden by default. Clients can click on the "Show Open Lessons" option on the right-hand side of the calendar. When enabled, the calendar will display all open lessons that are on or after the current date. If you've enabled the "Client Default Visibility" setting on the "Settings" page, any open classes will be displayed by default on family & student calendars.
NOTE: Open classes that are full and don't have any of the client's students enrolled will not be displayed when viewing the calendar in a client's account.
Joining Lessons
In order to join an open class, your clients can follow the steps below:
Click on the "Show Open Lessons" checkbox on the right-hand side of the calendar.
Click on the lesson on the calendar.
Click the "Join" option in the pop-up.
Select the student(s) that are joining the lesson.
Submit the form to save the changes.
Joining Courses
You can find a complete and detailed guide about creating courses in Teachworks and how you can allow your students to join a full course of lessons at once here: Creating Courses.
Cancelling Lessons
If a student cancels their lesson, you should remove them from the lesson instead of changing their status to "Cancelled". This ensures that the lesson status remains "Scheduled" so that other students can join, and that the space is made available to other students. You can follow the steps below to remove a student from a lesson:
Click on the lesson on the calendar.
Click on the "Edit" link in the pop-up.
Remove the student in the "Students" field by clicking the "X" next to their name.
Submit the form to save your changes.
NOTE: If you are using the Customer Cancellations Add-on and a customer cancels a student in an open class, only the student's status will be set to cancelled. The class status will remain unchanged so that other students can enroll in the class. To update the status for the entire class, complete the lesson as usual using the Complete Lesson form.