Help

Students

1. Sign in with Google, using the account your calendar is on. At the university that’s usually your university account.
2. Under Join a class, type the six-character code your lecturer gave you and press Join. Codes aren’t case-sensitive.
3. The class appears in your timetable here and, within a minute or so, on your Google Calendar for the whole semester.

When a lecturer moves or cancels a session, your calendar updates by itself. To stop getting a class, choose Leave class on its card.

Put your timetable in your calendar

Open the Calendar page and add your personal subscription link to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. It needs doing once; your classes, CATs, assignment deadlines and exams then stay up to date by themselves. Google Calendar fetches changes every few hours, Apple Calendar and Outlook more often. The timetable in Ratibu itself is always current.

If you also get Google Calendar invitations from your lecturers, turn invitations off on the Calendar page, so nothing appears twice.

More than one school

Everyone signs in with an ordinary Google account. You join a school by joining one of its classes: the class code (like KU-7ADZAW) or the join link your lecturer shares shows the class and its school before you join. If you study or teach at more than one school, pick the school at the top of the page, or choose All my schools to see everything together. Your calendar link always includes all of them.

Class reps

If your lecturer makes you a class rep, you can change the room of a single session, for example when a projector is broken or another class is in your room. Click the session in your timetable and choose Change venue. Only the room changes, never the time. Your classmates see the new room straight away, and your lecturer can undo it.

Rooms

The Rooms page shows which rooms are booked on a day, for how long, and which are free now. Use Find a free room to search by date, time, seats and building. Bookings come straight from the timetable, so nobody books rooms by hand.

CATs, assignments and exams

The Assessments page lists everything coming up in your classes, with a countdown. They also appear in your timetable and your calendar.

A class isn’t on my calendar

• Check which account you used. Your classes go to the calendar of the Google account you signed in with, shown under your name in the top right.
• Accept the first invitation. If your Google Calendar setting “Add invitations to my calendar” is set to “Only if the sender is known” or “When I respond”, look for an email from Google Calendar and accept it. You can change the setting in Google Calendar under Settings, then Events from Gmail and Invitations.
• Look at the class in Ratibu. If it says “Waiting for lecturer” or “Not synced yet”, your lecturer still needs to connect their Google Calendar. Let them know.

Lecturers

1. Sign in and allow Ratibu to manage events on your Google Calendar when Google asks. Tick the calendar box on that screen; without it, classes stay in Ratibu only.
2. Choose New class, pick the semester, the days it meets, the times and the room.
3. Share the class’s join code with students (click it to copy), or add their Google emails under Students.
4. To move or cancel one session, click it in the timetable. To change the whole series, use Edit on the class.
5. Make one or more students class reps in a class’s Students list. Reps can change the room of a single session; you see “Room changed by…” on that session and can undo it.
6. Pick each class’s room from the list of your university’s rooms. If it’s already booked at that time, Ratibu shows who has it and suggests free rooms; you can still book it if you need to.
7. On the Assessments page, add CATs, assignment deadlines and exams. Each one reaches every student in the class. Exams can be scheduled up to eight weeks after the last teaching day.

“Sync failed”

The class’s card in Ratibu says what went wrong. Most often your Google access expired or was removed: sign out, sign in again, allow calendar access, then press Retry sync on the class. Retry sync re-sends the class, its students and every one-off change.

Admins

• Publish a semester with its first and last teaching day before lecturers add classes. Lecturers can only use published semesters.
• Add holidays and breaks to a semester. Those days come off every class at once. Removing one puts the days back.
• Add lecturers and other admins on the Users page, under Staff roles. Changes apply the next time that person opens Ratibu. You can also delete accounts there.
• Timetable automatically on the Timetabling page. Create a class group (for example “BSc Computer Science, Year 2”) with its number of students, list its courses with the lecturer, hours a week and session length, and press Generate timetable. Ratibu finds times and rooms with no clashes for lecturers, the group or rooms, keeps lunch and out-of-hours free, and lists anything it couldn’t place with the reason. Move any session by hand (it’s then locked), generate again around it, and Publish: the courses become real classes, and students join all of them with the group’s code. Use Add several to type or paste a whole list of units at once (straight from a spreadsheet), set each lecturer’s Availability (times they can’t teach), and press Generate all groups to timetable every class group in the semester together, so lecturers and rooms are shared across the whole school.
• Set up rooms on the admin Rooms page: buildings, their floors, and the rooms on each floor (you can paste many room numbers at once). Locations typed in before rooms existed can be matched to rooms in one step, and room clashes are listed there too.
• Check every class and assessment on the Classes and Assessments pages. Exams and CATs that clash, in the same room or with shared students, are flagged.

Changing a semester’s dates or breaks updates every class in it on Google Calendar. With many classes this takes a few minutes; the semester shows its progress while it runs.

Contact

For problems with your account or your classes, contact the ICT help desk at the university. For questions about a specific class, ask its lecturer.