Why I love Units of Work

Not many lesson planning packages use Unit/s of Work (UoW) to organise their lessons. Classmaker uses them for everything! What is a UoW? A UoW is a container that holds a lesson collection. The lesson collection comprises individual lessons and supporting files. UoW are similar to tags, but unlike tags, a lesson cannot exist without belonging to a UoW and a lesson can only belong to one UoW.  Conversely, multiple tags can be assigned to an individual lesson and by default a lesson has no tags.

This graphic shows how the major components of Classmaker relate to each other using a Venn diagram.

At face value, UoW seem too restrictive..., and tags would appear to be a much better bet, but as I will show, this is not the case.

Pros

1.  Because a lesson must belong to a UoW, a UoW can be much more descriptive than a tag and combine operational information with data. For instance, in Classmaker, the UoW has a title, a short description, the lesson type (non-contact, routine, unit plan, rotating), whether the UoW has just been imported or if is marked for export and a list of all the supporting files attached to it. The subject of the lesson is listed in the Long Term Plan (a superset UoW) along with whether you want to display it's lessons on the Weekly Calendar or not. All of this is information that you don't want to have attached directly to individual lesson plans as some of it is operational information rather than data. Even the data may not be required on some lesson reports. But this is information that you want to be able to refer to easily if you need to, which is discussed next in 2.

2.  UoW's are reciprocal.  By this I mean that if you click on a UoW you can easily view all the child records that belong to it.  But this also works the other way around.  If you click on a child record you instantly know the parent UoW that it belongs to as well. Classmaker uses reciprocity extensively in it's user interface. Whenever you click on a lesson plan on the Weekly Calendar, the lesson detail brings up the UoW that lesson plan belongs to, all the other related lessons in the same UoW, the Long Term Plan the UoW belongs to and all the other related UoW in that Long Term Plan. This visual overview of your planning, Classmaker retrieves for you automatically, every time you click on a lesson plan.

3.  It is much easier to work with groups of records rather than one record at a time. UoW's facilitate this since a lesson can only belong to one UoW. When you delete a UoW, everything inside it goes too. Conversely, to create a clone of a UoW, export and import the entire UoW (1, 1a or 1b) via the hard disk.  The UoW keeps track of whether it is flagged to be exported, is waiting to be imported from disk or has recently been imported, rather than having to concern yourself with the state of the individual lessons involved.

4.  Batch jobs have been used in computing for a long time. The advantage of using batches is that small groups of records can be manipulated together, without exposing the database to the risk of all it's structure being changed beyond reversal by a single SQL statement. UoW's are analogous to a batch job. They can be cloned, deleted and their lesson plan dates changed using Shove. If the result is not what is expected, the cloned UoW is deleted.  Classmaker users will discover that they often use UoW's clone, delete and edit functionality to create new records from existing records as it is much easier to clone, delete and edit records than it is to create them from scratch, particularly if you use Rotating Schedules.

5.  A Classmaker user will clone and edit whenever they can.  For instance, say you need to create a new record in the same time slot as today, but for tomorrow in a different subject.  In all the other packages I've tried, your only solution would be to create a new record from scratch.  In Classmaker, you take today's record, push it forward one day (+Day) and then add it into a different Long Term Plan and Unit Plan (2c.), just four mouse-clicks with no typing of dates and times. This works due to UoW's reciprocity, mentioned above in 2.

6.  Hierarchical data structures are simple to export to disk as that is how the file system works. The parent child relationship implicit in UoW mean their existing structure can be written to disk intact. All other packages I've tried, export their lesson plans as flat files destroying their user interface relationships in the process (that's if they've even tried to export their lessons. Many vendors don't bother).

Of course, UoW's aren't all beer and skittles!

 

Cons

1.  A lesson cannot belong to multiple UoW.  With tags this is a no-brainer and their most useful attribute.
2.  You do not know at a glance all the different UoW you've created, but it's easy to see all your tags.
3.  The tags associated with a lesson can easily be changed at any time. It's more difficult to move a lesson plan from one UoW to another.

 

Summary

I prefer UoW to tags because their hierarchical structure readily translates to data hiding, reciprocity in user interfaces, easy exporting and importing, batching of work, cloning and editing records instead of creating new ones and database exporting to disk without destroying parent child relationships.