Subscriptions at FLLCasts
A subscription gives you access to the platform. You can subscribe for different levels of access for a different payment. The subscription knows only this: when have you subscribed and to what level of access.
Subscription
People could be added to your subscription. In the case of a Team the mentor of a team can add more people to the team and to give access to more students.
Or you could be a Parent that would like to add two, three children in the same subscription.
The owner of the subscription is the one who pays for the subscription. The owner could upgrade it or cancel it. The users of the subscription get access to the platform based on the level this Subscription provides.
Organizations and Groups at FLLCasts
One of the large differences at FLLCasts is that students do not participate in Courses. Students participate in Groups. Courses are like books. You can read many of them while participating in a Group.
When you Enrol in a Course this means you've started reading a book. When you Enrol in a Group this means you participate in a group of students and instructors that are meeting at specific hours, in specific days and are trying to work together towards a competition or are in a after class club or are a class at a school.
Groups are owned by organizations.
Organization (Team/School/Library/Family)
When two or more people work together we call this an organization. The Organization could be a School, or a Team for example.
If you are using the platform personally you don't have to have an organization. But the moment you need to group students or teachers you must create an Organization.
Groups
The Group is used to group "students" and "instructors". A group could have any number of "students" and "instructors". People in the group could have different level of access and could be in different subscriptions. The "instructors" could have access to "School Teacher Subscription" while the students could have access to "School Student Subscriptions".
Groups have a starting date, groups have a schedule, groups have location. In is the the Course. It is the Group. People participating in one Group could move through many courses and tutorials and materials a in an year.
Groups are part of an organization. If the organization is a school than the groups could be the different classes in the school. Or if the organization is a library, you could use the groups to represent the different clubs in this library. Groups should be specific. There is no "Science Fair Group" in the library. The name should be "2019 Jan-July, Sunday 17:00, Science Fair Group". This means that people in these groups are gathering from Jan to July 2019 and are working on Sunday, 17:00 and are preparing for the "Science Fair".
In one Team there could be many groups. For robotics competitions there could be a "FLL 2018 Team4453 Programming Group" and "FLL 2018 Robot Construction Group" and "FLL 2018 Presentation Group" and "FLL 2018 The Whole Team Group". In this way different assignments could be given to each group and the progress for the Group could be tracked.
How to use a new course with your group in FLLCasts
You as a teacher already have students that come in a group and work on a course. Now either the course is complete or you want to show a new course to your group, what do you do?
You can find the new course in the big Courses section in the top menu in the site.
You can find the next course in the curriculum in the Teach at school page.
Now let all your students login in the site, and navigate to the course themselves. Then the students themselves click the Enroll button in the course description.
The students must login one after the other, not as partners this time only.
That is all you have to do. The students remain in the same group that you used so far. You can confirm tasks for the new course from the same place that you are used to - Groups.
How to quickly navigate to a new course
It can be done via following links as explained above or simply typing the id number of the course.
How to do that?
You as a teacher open the new course and click at the navigation bar of your browser (or Ctrl+L if nothing helps). There should be something like https://www.fllcasts.com/courses/71-introduction-a1
The number right after "courses/" is the ID we are looking for. For every course that ID is different.
Now tell your students to login and click the courses section from the top menu in the site.
The students must login one after the other, not as partners this time only.
They have to click the navigation bar of the browser and type "/" and the id number of the course and press enter. So from https://www.fllcasts.com/courses it will become https://www.fllcasts.com/courses/71
The new course will load and they must click Enroll.
Once all of them are enrolled in the new course, they can login as partners and begin work.
The whole process is expected to take 5 to 10 minutes.