Classes: the groups your learners actually sit in
Every enrolment, every timetable slot, every fee price and every booklist hangs off one of these rows.
Classes are the containers you teach in. A learner is enrolled into a class, a course is offered to a class, a fee structure prices a class, a timetable places a class in a room at a time, and a booklist tells a class what to buy. Get the classes right and the rest of the academic menu falls into place without any further effort.
The word on the screen changes with your programme, and so does the Type you pick when you create a row. A secondary school opens Class Streams — Sixth Year A, Sixth Year B. A university opens University Levels — Level 100, Level 200. A vocational centre opens Vocational Cohorts — Carpentry 2026, Tailoring 2026. The type is what tells the rest of the portal which of these it is looking at, so choose it once and never change it for an existing class.
This screen is small and it is quick to work. Ten classes for a secondary school, five levels for a university, a handful of cohorts for a training centre. Set them up before the year starts, because classes are what you enrol learners into and you cannot enrol anyone into a class that does not exist yet.
Open your classes in four steps
Ten minutes that every other academic screen depends on.
-
Step 1
Open Academic > Classes
The list is deliberately short. If it looks empty, you are simply at the start of the year rather than looking at the wrong place.
-
Step 2
Name it and give it a code
Click New Group. Give the Name the way the school says it aloud — “Sixth Year A”, “Level 200”, “Carpentry 2026” — and a short Code such as 6A, L200 or MEN26 that you will use in spreadsheets and imports.
-
Step 3
Pick the right type
Set the Type to Class Stream, University Level or Vocational Cohort. This is the one field that decides how the class is read everywhere else in the portal.
-
Step 4
Colour it, activate it, save
The Colour picker is cosmetic but useful on crowded timetables. Tick Active so the class appears in every dropdown, then save. Repeat for the next class.
Three kinds of school, three kinds of class
The Type column is the honest description of what a row is — use it, because it changes the wording on screens families and teachers read.
Class Stream, for a school that teaches by class
A stream is a group of learners who sit together for the whole year: Sixth Year A, JSS 2B, Terminal 1. Streams are how a Cameroonian secondary school is organised, and this is the type a basic education school should use. The class carries its own fee structure, its own timetable and its own booklist, which is exactly why a school that runs A and B streams at different prices needs two rows.
University Level, for faculties and programmes
A level is a year of study shared by every programme in the faculty: Level 100, Level 200, Level 300. Because the level is not the programme, Courses carry the extra detail — each course is offered to a level, marked Major or Minor, and counts for a number of credits. That is why a university’s timetable is built from course schedules across the level rather than from one row per class.
Vocational Cohort, for training centres
A cohort is a group formed for one trade, one intake and one period of training. Carpentry 2026 and Carpentry 2027 are two rows even though they study the same modules, because the fee, the teacher workload and the certification dates differ. Use the Cohort Duration type to record how long the training runs.
Codes and colours earn their keep
The short code is what appears on timetable headings, report slip columns and the first column of every import sheet — it is the one string that has to be identical in five different places, so choose something short enough to write by hand and unique enough to never confuse with another class. The colour is what lets a head teacher scan a full timetable and see at a glance which periods are Sixth A, Sixth B and Seventh A.
Rooms, timetables and course registration
A class is not a room. Here is where the room is decided, and how a learner gets onto a course.
The room belongs to the course schedule
Classes deliberately carry no room field, because one class is in different rooms at different hours of the week. Rooms are listed separately in Scheduling > Halls with their names and capacities, and a room is assigned on a Course Schedule — the row that ties a course to a group, to an academic period, to a teacher and to a hall. Build the timetable from those rows and clashes disappear, because two subjects cannot claim the same hall and the same slot.
Placing learners in a class
For a school, a learner is placed by enrolling them: Admissions > Enrollments asks for the academic year and the class, and the fee price follows automatically from the fee structure attached to that class. For a university the placement happens the same way — a student is enrolled into a level — and the programme detail is carried by the courses themselves.
At a university, learners register for courses themselves
Once enrolled in a level, a student picks their courses on the Form B page of their own portal, grouped as obligatory courses for the level, major courses for their programme and minor courses they choose. They choose the semester, they can carry over courses they have not passed, and the registration then flows to the school for the fees to be read against it. That is why a university’s Courses must be marked Major or Minor and their obligatoriness set correctly before registration opens — otherwise a student sees the wrong set of courses.
Bringing a whole class in from a spreadsheet
The Classes table carries import and export controls. Download the sample, and fill one row per class with the name, the code and the type — the sample shows the accepted type values — then import it. Ten classes that took twenty minutes by hand take a minute this way, and you keep a spreadsheet copy of your own structure that nobody can silently change.
What reads a class
Six screens that quietly depend on this one.
-
Place
Enrollments
Every learner is enrolled into exactly one class, which is what fixes the price they are charged.
Class questions
Asked by whoever is building the structure for the new year.
-
Should Sixth Year A and Sixth Year B be two rows or one?
Two rows, as soon as anything differs between them — a different fee, a different teacher, a different room pattern or a different set of optional subjects. A class is the unit that carries the fee price, the timetable and the booklist, so one row means one shared version of all three. If the two groups are genuinely identical in every one of those, merge them and lose the ability to differentiate later.
-
Where do I set the classroom for a class?
Not on the class itself. List your rooms under Scheduling > Halls with their names and capacities, then choose the hall on the Course Schedule row for that subject, that group and that academic period. Because the room is attached to a specific slot rather than to the class, a class can be in one hall on Monday morning and another on Thursday afternoon without any conflict.
-
We are a university. Do we still create classes?
You create levels rather than streams — Level 100, Level 200 — using the University Level type. Each student is enrolled into a level, then chooses their own courses on Form B from their portal, where the obligatory, major and minor courses are shown separately. The programme detail lives on the courses, so mark each one Major or Minor and set whether it is obligatory for the level.
-
Can I close a class without deleting it?
Switch its Active flag off. The row stays in the list and stays readable, so last year’s timetables, reports and payment history still mean something, but the class stops appearing in the dropdowns where you enrol learners and attach courses. Deleting a class that has ever held learners takes their enrolments, marks and reports with it, so it is the wrong repair for a class you have simply finished with.