Course schedule planner

How to use the planner

1. List the lessons in the order you teach them, one per line. Numbers and bullets are removed, so you can paste a list straight from an outline or a syllabus.
2. Choose the start date and the teaching days. If the start date isn’t a teaching day, the first session moves to the next one and the planner tells you.
3. Set the session. How many lessons fit in one session (1 to 3), when it starts and how long it lasts.
4. List the dates to skip: public holidays, school breaks, a staff training day. One date or a range per line, with a name after it if you like.
5. Export it. The .ics file puts every session in a calendar, the CSV opens in a spreadsheet, and the Markdown table drops into a syllabus or a course page.

How the dates are worked out

The planner walks forward from the start date one day at a time. Every teaching day that isn’t on your skip list becomes a session and takes the next lesson or lessons from the list. The last session’s date is the end date. Weeks are counted Monday to Sunday from the first session to the last, including weeks without sessions, because a break still adds to how long the course runs.

Dates are worked out as plain calendar days, never as local times, so the change to or from summer time can’t move a session to the wrong day. The calendar file uses the same idea for times: 18:00 stays 18:00.

A worked example

The example above is the JavaScript module of a part-time web development bootcamp: 12 lessons, one per evening, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 18:00 to 21:00, starting on Tuesday 17 November 2026, with a winter break from 21 December to 1 January.

Two things stand out. The break lands just before the last two lessons, so the final project starts after two weeks away: it’s worth adding a short review session at the start of January. And with two lessons per evening, the module would finish on Thursday 3 December, before the break, but each evening would carry twice as much new material.

Spacing sessions: why two evenings beat one long day

The same number of hours spread over more sessions is remembered better than the same hours in one block. This spacing effect is one of the most consistent findings in learning research: a review of hundreds of experiments by Cepeda and colleagues (2006) found it again and again, and Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) rated distributed (spaced) practice as one of only two study techniques with high usefulness.

For a course calendar, that means:

• Leave a day between sessions when you can. Tuesday and Thursday give learners a day to practise and forget a little, which makes the next session’s recall do more work.
• Prefer more, shorter sessions to fewer long ones for new material. Long days suit project work better than new concepts.
• Open each session with a few questions on the last one. It costs five minutes and brings back what the gap was starting to erase.

Buffer sessions and holidays

Courses rarely run exactly to plan: a topic takes longer, a session is lost to illness, a group needs more practice. One rule of thumb is a buffer session for every five or six taught ones; it’s a starting point, not a research finding, so adjust it after the first run. Add a line such as “Review and catch-up” to the lesson list and it gets a date like any other lesson.

• Check public and school holidays for every place your learners are, not just yours.
• Keep assessments and project deadlines off the first session after a break.
• Share the calendar file with the group early, and send an updated one if dates move: the file’s events have new IDs each time, so delete the old calendar before importing the new one.

If you haven’t settled the lessons yet, the course outline builder helps you plan parts and lessons with timings first, and the course workload calculator checks that the reading and exercises around each session fit into a learner’s week.