Appointment Blocks
Appointment blocks are portions of your Calendar where students are allowed to claim appointment spots. There are a lot of options to set because this ensures that the right students are seeing the right blocks for the right activities — when, where, and how you can support them.
Sample Workflow
Rachel is attempting to provide different options of scheduling for different student groups. On Mondays she creates an appointment block for schedule-ahead appointments and allows for any modality (in-person, online, phone) to be selected. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she reserves time in the morning to be available for her student-athletes via online appointments, since she knows the teams typically practice in the afternoons. She and her colleagues also found that students want the option for walk-in appointments, so she has blocked off Wednesday and Friday mornings for in-person walk-in hours.
Services and Service Offerings
“Services” target a specific location, and “Service Offerings” are an optional, additional layer of service types to guide students to the help they need. When scheduling appointment blocks, set which particular offerings students can get.
For example, if new advisors only advise first-year students, create offerings that include “first-year” and set their appointment blocks to enable “first-year” only. This way, students who filter for “first-year” will only see and pick those appointment slots.
How it works — If a user with those permissions defined Service Offerings for a Service you’re providing, you’ll need to pick which offerings apply whenever you create appointment slot blocks for that service. By default, all offerings are selected, so you need to remove any that aren’t on offer for these new slots.
To remove a service offering from the block you’re creating, select the ✕ to the right of the text:
To see all the offerings, use the drop-down list:
Kiosks — Currently, Service Offerings are only available for appointment scheduling, not kiosks.
Appointment Types/Modality
Choices in appointment types and modalities let you adapt to meet the needs of different student groups and let you actually report how you are interacting with students during appointments.
Appointment Type sets when you will meet the student:
- Schedule Ahead — future
- Walk-in — now
Appointment Modality sets how you interact with the student, depending on your situation:
| In Person | Requires a location. Tip: Change this default by updating your Profile. | Enter a meeting location, such as an office address. Your entry can be any length, but use only letters, numbers, and these special characters: !@*%.,-=’_:;()”?. |
| Phone Call | Requires a phone number. Tip: Change this default by updating your Profile. | Enter a phone number or describe your phone policies. Your entry can be any length, but use only letters, numbers, and these special characters: .()-. |
| Virtual Meeting | Requires a meeting URL. | Enter a URL or instructions for attending a virtual meeting. Your entry can be any length, but use only letters, numbers, and these special characters: !@&*%.,-=’_:;()”?. |
| Zoom Virtual Meeting | Requires Zoom integration and your own account connection, through your Settings. | With Zoom integration, the meeting will be created and managed for you. |
Which of these appointment types you see depends on your institution’s configuration:
- In-Person
- Phone Call
- Virtual Meeting
- Zoom Virtual Meeting
- Walk-In
- None
Creating Advising Hours (Appointment Slots)
Most Advising Roles (Advisor, Advisor+, Director, Administrative Assistant) can create advising hours (Appointment Slots), defining the slots of time available for appointments. What differs is whether you can create blocks on your own calendar only or whether you can create them on another advisor’s calendar in your SSU.
Important: You make slots available to either all students or to a custom group of students.
Create Appointment Slots
To begin creating a slot, click and drag the mouse across a part of the day for the slot, or click the + create button. This will open the Appointment Slots tab, which has options specific to your SSU and your role.
Best practice: Take time and care in setting your appointment slot options, to avoid misleading or confusing students.
| Select calendar Required You will see this option only if you have a role (Director, Admin, Scheduling Manager) or permissions that let you schedule on behalf of other users . By default, “My Calendar” is selected. If you change the calendar, the other options will update to match. | |
| Scheduling available to Required Choose which student groups can access these slots. You can keep the system defaults (All students) for your SSU, or you can choose to give these slots to a group (static or dynamic) instead: Click the ‘x’ to remove “All students”. Type to auto-suggest and select your group. Add additional groups as needed. | |
| Select Services and Service Offerings These appear only if your SSU has advising Services defined, which are required to allow students to use a kiosk for walk-ins and appointment check-ins. If Service Offerings appear, be sure to select which types apply to this block of appointment slots. | |
| Display on student’s calendar as Optional If you are limiting this block to a special purpose and want to change how students see this block on their calendars, you can select one of the preconfigured descriptions for your SSU. Otherwise, it will use the default description for your SSU. | |
| Scheduling deadline for students Optional To ensure that you have enough time to prepare before appointments in this block, you may want to prevent last-minute signups by selecting one of these scheduling deadlines. The deadline is the time after which students can no longer sign up for an appointment in that block. | |
| Appointment Modality Required Select the modalities you would like to include (in-person, phone call, virtual meeting, Zoom virtual meeting) and update details in the location field. | |
| Start Date/Start Time/End Time Required Add the start date, start time for block of slots, and end time for the block. Tip: You can select a range that doesn’t divide evenly by your time slot increment. The last slot will just include the extra time. | |
| Repeat Option Optional Choose to make appointment slots repeat over weeks, days or months and select the duration for each appointment slot. Tip: The Repeat Option lets you design blocks for the entire week, month, term, or year. You can always adjust the repeat pattern later by clicking on the block, and your changes will affect the future appointments only. | |
| Slot Duration Defaults to 30-minute time slots. What options appear here depends on your institution’s configuration. As soon as you change the slot duration, a new listing of slots appears with checkboxes, where you can block off certain slots (such as for breaks). |
Review your selections, then click Add. The indicated student group will see the advising hours you created on their calendar. If a slot already has an appointment or a conflict (from your calendar), students will see it as an Unavailable slot.
Edit Appointment Slots
From the Calendar View, click on an appointment slot.
Once it opens, you have two tabs, for these tasks:
- Edit Appointment Slot — Edit the details of the appointment slot block itself
- Schedule Appointment — Create an appointment for one of the slots
Edit the information and click Update.
Edit Recurring Slots
Important: Recurring events have some different behaviors:
- Changes you make don’t affect slots that you blocked off (those act like scheduled appointments).
- Changes to the available slots must be either for one slot or all future ones.
- If you need to change the details of how the slot recurs over time, delete the future slots and create them with your new pattern.
Scheduling Appointments
There are several ways to schedule an appointment from the Calendar, but, once scheduled, the appointment behaves the same:
- It appears on your calendar.
- Both you and the student receive an email confirmation with the appointment details and links.
- An empty advising note is auto-generated, as a placeholder.
From Available Appointments Tab
Once you have set up your calendar and created appointment slots, you can schedule appointments from the Available Appointments tab on the calendar.
- On the Available Appointments tab, check to see (lower left) that you’re viewing the correct calendar, if you can see multiples.
- Below that, the Appointment Status filter defaults to Available, so that you see only open slots.
- Select a row to schedule.
- Enter a student name for the field labeled ‘Appointment with’ and scroll down to enter appointment information.
- Choose session topics, add session (visible to the student) and intake (not visible to the student) notes, and click Schedule.
- The appointment will appear on your calendar, where you can edit it. Both you and the student will receive an email confirmation with appointment details.
- To change or delete the appointment, edit it and scroll down to the very bottom:
From Schedule Appointment Tab
- Click an open area on the calendar and navigate to the Schedule Appointment tab.
- Enter a student name and select an appointment slot.
- Choose session topics, add session (visible to the student) and intake (not visible to the student) notes, and click Schedule.
- The appointment will appear on your calendar. Both you and the student will receive an email confirmation with appointment details.
- To change or delete the appointment, edit it and scroll down to the very bottom: