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So, for 2020/21, it seems most education providers are going down the route of blended delivery; a mix of online content and face-to-face teaching to small groups that respect social distancing guidelines.

Whilst some are creating rotas for small groups, so there is an equal opportunity to visit campus for all students who are able to, others are considering a self-service approach for students, allowing them to decide for themselves whether to attend activities in-person.

CELCAT offers two ways of supporting the latter; Event Sign-Up and Student Activity Allocator. But which is the best tool for the job?

To help you decide it’s important to understand the differences between the two methods.

Event Sign-Up is designed for an ad-hoc event, with a specified maximum event size and open to any student, whereas the Student Activity Allocator allows students to allocate themselves to an activity group of a repeating event (e.g. a lecture, seminar, practical, etc.) for a module. The number of available places in each activity group being determined by the target size.
Both methods allow you to set a date range which determines when students can access these services through the CELCAT Self-Service mobile web app.

The real power of the Student Activity Allocator is the clash detection which dynamically adjusts the selection options. For example, let’s say a student enrols for modules A and B and decides to join an on-campus workshop group for module A on Tuesday morning, the time slot of which happens to overlap with an online seminar group for module B. The seminar group will be greyed out, along with a description of the obstacle preventing the student joining that group. However, if it turns out that attending that seminar on a Tuesday morning is absolutely necessary, the student can leave the workshop group, join the seminar group and see what other workshop groups are available instead.

Event Sign-Up requires less set-up as it’s not dependant on a student’s module enrolment and doesn’t require pre-existing groups. So, this is best deployed for events that are ad-hoc and open to practically every student in the institution, although you can restrict the sign-up to students of the same school or department of the event.

So, now you know the difference, why not contact your Account Manager and request a demonstration.