Managing Outreach Activity Sessions
Outreach Activities that are Open Enrollment/Public or Custom, have sessions, which denote specifically when the activity will occur. Sessions are what appear on the Outreach calendar and for this reason, they are a critical component of the Outreach Activity Form process.
When you filled out the Outreach Activity form, you added a start and end date and time. Those two fields are the outer boundaries for the activity. The sessions represent each meeting of the class or other activity in between the start and end dates and times. For example, if a start date/time is 3/10/2022 9:00 am and an end date and time is 3/12/2022 4:00 pm, and the activity meets each day during those times, there are 3 sessions, on the 10th, 11th, and 12th. Sessions can start and stop at different times each day, but by default, they will start and end at the same time based on the start and end times.
Prior to creating sessions, it is helpful to note the start and end date of your activity on the Activity Form.
There are two ways to create sessions. The quickest way, which works for the vast majority of activities, is to use the “Create Sessions” button, which can be found at the top of any Activity form. We’ll walk through this process below, and then touch on the other, more manual method to create sessions.
First, open the desired Activity Form and click the Create Sessions button:
The Create Sessions form will appear, with 3 fields. Enter the number of sessions you wish to create (in our example from above, this would be “3”.
Next, select the pattern for the sessions. These can be every day, every other day, or once per week. If you have a different pattern in mind, select “Other” to exit to form in order to create the sessions manually, which will be covered at the end of this document.
Lastly, choose whether or not you want to schedule on weekend days.
Click Next to continue.
The example above was simply a 3 consecutive days. A more complex example would be a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule for 2 weeks. In this scenario, before clicking the “Create Sessions” button, you would want to verify that your start date for the activity was the first date of the class, for example, Monday 3/7/2022 at 9:00 am. Click the Create Sessions buttion, then enter “6” in the first blank (Mon/Wed/Fri for 2 weeks is 6 sessions), select “Every Other Day” as your pattern, and leave the “Schedule on weekend days” checkbox unchecked. Click Next.
After sessions are created, they will appear at the upper right on the Activity Form:
Editing Sessions One at a Time
There are two ways to edit sessions: manually for editing sessions one at a time, or bulk-editing for multiple sessions at once. To manually edit sessions one at a time, in the Activities Sessions window at the upper right of the Activity Form in question, click the session ID link to open the session:
This will open the session detail page. Click the pencil icons next to the start and/or end date/time fields:
After clicking the pencil icons, the session editing screen will appear. Change the dates and times as needed and click Save.
To return to the Outreach Activity Form, click the blue link to it I the middle of the session page:
Bulk Editing Session Times
If you have a number of sessions that you need to change the time on, use the checkboxes in the Activities Sessions section to select the sessions to edit, then click the “Bulk Edit” button, also found in the Activities Sessions section of the Activity Form.
If you are not changing one of the times, just enter the original time. When finished, click the “Submit” button.
Note that you cannot change dates of sessions this way. There is no way to bulk-edit the session dates in the user interface, and for a small number, you can manually edit them as described earlier in this document. But if you have a significant number of dates to change, contact ilractivityform@cornell.edu.
Creating Activity Sessions Manually
It is also possible to create Activity Sessions from scratch, one at a time, manually. This may be helpful if the activity has an unusual schedule that does not follow a predictable pattern. (Note that it is also fine to use a combination of the Create Sessions button and this manual method if an activity follows a mostly predictable schedule, with just a few sessions that do not follow the pattern.)
To enter create sessions manually, click the “New” button inside the Activities Sessions box at upper right in the Activity Form:
Enter the start and end dates and times and either click “Save” if finished, or “Save & New” if you wish to immediately create another session:
Multiple Sessions per Day
If you want to create multiple sessions per day, there are a couple ways to do that. You could manually create all the sessions if there aren’t many. Another option is to use the create sessions button twice and then bulk-edit half the sessions to be the mornings and half as the afternoons. Note that you CANNOT create all the sessions at once using Create Sessions because you can only create a maximum of 1 session per day with each Create Sessions operation. But you can run Create Sessions as many times as you wish to create duplicate entries and then edit them with bulk-edit.
If you have difficulty accessing the information contained in this document or any document in this knowledgebase, please contact us at access-ilr@cornell.edu and we will assist you.