It is common practice to divide the school year in two or three segments.
On Beebop these are called 'Terms' but you may know them as Study Blocks, Semesters (or Trimesters).
Terms must exist on Beebop before any class can be created.
- If your school does NOT split the year into segments, a single Term must still exist for each academic year.
- If you school uses different Terms for different courses, multiple overlapping Terms can be created and exist at the same time (read more at the end of this page).
Terms are created from Resources > Terms or directly while creating a new class.
Creating Terms is a senior admin task, usually performed before the start of each academic year, creating one or more Terms as required.
Most of Beebop's tracking and reporting features (including attendance) are based on Terms.
Terms are also used to automatically set class start and end dates, which in turns affects its content visibility in a variety of ways.
The Term name gets automatically appended to a class name, becoming a permantent part of it.
Terms are global for the whole school and should not be created lightly.
Once a class has been linked to a Term, the Term can no longer be deleted or edited.
Term names are created from the combination of two digits for the academic year (start year) and two digits of your choice.
Our recommendation for a standard naming system would be to use 'T' for Term and a number to indicate which term it is within the academic year.
For example, let's say your school divides the academic year in two semesters (September-December and January-April); in this case the Term names for the academic year 2025-2026 could be 25T1 and 25T2.
Note that we are keeping the year for the term that takes place in 2026 to be '25' (the START of the academic year), to avoid potential confusion and help identify quickly which class belongs to which academic year.
Seeing that a class name ends with 25T2 will show that this class takes place in the second Term of the academic year 2025-2026.
By default, each class created on Beebop starts on the same day as the Terms it is associated with, and is considered concluded on the day the Term ends.
It is always possible to set a class start date to be AFTER the official start of the Term, but not before.
Likewise, it is always possible to set a class to end sooner, but never AFTER than the Term conclusion.
If in doubt, we recommend setting your Term dates to allow for a few extra days at both ends, since these dates cannot be changed once the first class has been created for that Term.
For example, if the last lecture for T1 is on the 12th of December but you expect students making assigment submissions well into the end of January when the next Term has already started, it is perfectly fine to have T1 end date to be the 30th of January even as T2 start date was set to be the 1st of January.
As just stated, it is pefectly fine to have the tail end of one term to overlap with the start of the next one.
If you are running courses that require different Term periods (for example, one course is divided into three periods of 8 weeks each, and another course is split into two blocks of 12 weeks) you should create different Terms to reflect this.
In this case you will use the last two digits in the Term name to help identify which is which.
For example, the you could end up with 25T1, 25T2, 25T3 for the three Terms used by the first course, and 25S1, 25S2 for the second one (using 'S' for Semester, but you can choose whichever character makes the most sense for your situation).
Keep in mind that having separate simultaneous Terms is effectively a way to create a strong separation between courses and their management. Since most reports on Beebop are Term-based, you will be able to get reports on attendance and engagement for one Term at a time, but not for the two combined.
Having concurrent separate Terms suits pefectly the situation of a school where very different levels of education are delivered under the same roof (say, college, degree and master levels) and this strict separation in tracking and reporting is actually desirable.
On the other hand, it would not be advisable having separate terms for each class of similr courses, perhaps only because their calendars differ by just a couple of weeks. In this case we would still recommend using the same terms and simply leaving enough margin at both ends to include all courses.