Academics
Terms, Periods, and Classes
How terms, periods, and classes fit together — and when a class follows a shared period versus its own custom schedule.
If you run a co-op, micro-school, or any program with a class schedule, three building blocks work together to organize it: terms, periods, and classes. This article explains what each one is and, most importantly, how a class can either follow a shared period or set its own custom schedule.
The Big Picture
Think of it as three layers, from the outside in:
- A Term is a session of your year — like a semester or quarter — with a start and end date.
- A Period is a named, recurring time slot inside a term, such as "1st Hour" on Tuesdays from 9:00–10:00.
- A Class is a course families enroll in. It can span one or more terms, and it meets either on a period or on its own custom schedule.
A term contains many periods, and a term contains many classes. A class can be assigned to more than one term — for example, a class that runs every term of the school year — and it's created only once, no matter how many terms it spans.
Terms
A term is the container for everything else. You manage terms under Academics → Terms. A term has:
- A name — for example, "Fall 2026."
- Start and end dates — the window the term runs. These dates matter because they decide how many times each class actually meets (more on that below).
- A status — Upcoming, Active, or Archived.
- Enrollment settings — whether enrollment is open, an optional close date, and an optional family fee.
Periods
Periods are the recurring time slots inside a term. You add them to a term from the same Academics → Terms page. Each period has:
- A label — like "1st Hour" or "Morning Block."
- A day of the week — for example, Tuesday.
- A start and end time — for example, 9:00–10:00.
Periods exist so a co-op can share one consistent schedule. If your Tuesday morning has a "1st Hour," "2nd Hour," and" 3rd Hour," you create those three periods once on the term, and then every class can be slotted into one of them.
Tip
Classes: Period vs. Custom Schedule
This is the part that trips people up. When you create a class under Academics → Classes, you check off every term it should run in — one term or several — and the Schedule section gives you a choice between two modes:
Period
Custom schedule
Note
"Custom schedule" means a custom weekly time (a day plus a start and end time), not a single one-off calendar date. You can add more than one weekly slot to a custom class later — open the class and use its schedule section to add or remove times.
How Meeting Dates Get Generated
Whichever mode a class uses, the result is the same: the platform takes the weekly pattern (the period's day/time, or the custom day/time) and combines it with the term's start and end dates to generate the individual meeting dates — called sessions.
For example, a class on a Tuesday 9:00 period in a term that runs September through December produces one session for every Tuesday in that range. Those sessions are what you take attendance against on the class page. For a class that spans multiple terms, this happens once per term — each term generates its own sessions from its own dates and its own period, so a three-term class ends up with three separate blocks of sessions, one per term.
Note
Why Use a Period Instead of Always Going Custom?
Beyond keeping schedules tidy, periods power schedule conflict detection. A student can't be enrolled in two classes that share the same period — the system blocks the double-booking and tells the family which class is in the way.
Custom-schedule classes do not participate in this check, even if two of them happen to overlap in time. So if avoiding double-booked students matters to you, put your classes on periods.
Tip
Enrolling in a Multi-Term Class
When a class spans more than one term, families don't pick which of its terms to join — enrolling a student in the class enrolls them for every term it spans. There's no per-term enrollment step and no partial sign-up.
- The class fee is charged once per student, no matter how many terms the class runs across. A three-term class with a $75 fee still charges $75, not $225.
- The term family-registration fee is still per term. If a term has a family fee turned on, enrolling in a class that spans that term registers the family in it — so a family joining a three-term class is registered (and charged the family fee, if any) in all three terms, the same as if they'd joined each term separately.
Note
Putting It Together
A typical setup, start to finish: