LMS & virtual classes.

Most learning-management systems are a place to upload a slide deck and collect a homework file. Useful, forgettable. YESS treats the LMS as the part of the school that happens between the lessons — the reading a student does at home, the question they were too shy to ask in class, the note they jot while the teacher writes on the board, the quiz that tells the teacher half the class never understood step three.

Three ideas run through every chapter. First, one spine: a course is a subject taught to one section by one teacher this term, and everything — modules, assignments, quizzes, the forum, the live room — hangs off it, and everything graded flows into the same gradebook the report card reads. Second, accountability: the teacher's logbook isn't paperwork, it's the record that proves a class was taught, and it gates the teacher's pay. Third, the parent is never the last to know — a new assignment, a missed deadline, a falling quiz average all reach the parent's pocket the same day.

The classroom, extended past its walls — and held to its word.

Greenwood — our example school throughout — runs Form 1A Mathematics this term. A course in YESS is exactly that precise: one subject, one section, one teacher of record, one term. Mr. Adjei opens /dashboard/courses and creates it. It is born a draft — invisible to students until he's ready.

He builds the spine: modules (Whole Numbers, Fractions, Introduction to Algebra), then topics under each, then resources under each topic — a lesson note, a YouTube link, a worksheet PDF. When he finds a better edition of a worksheet he uploads a new version; the old link stays alive for anyone who bookmarked it, but the canonical pointer moves to the new file.

When the spine is ready he flips the course to published. Two things happen automatically: every student in Form 1A is enrolled (no manual roster), and each student's /portal/courses now shows the course with a progress bar. As a student opens topics and ticks them complete, the course percentage rolls up on its own — and when they reach 100%, the enrolment quietly marks itself completed.

A lesson note is the teacher's write-up of what was taught — rich text, tables, maths, images, attached files. Mr. Adjei publishes the day's note from the course's lesson-notes surface. Students read it on /portal/courses/<id>, and the system records a read receipt — so Mr. Adjei can see, at a glance, that 27 of 30 students opened the note and three never did.

Reading raises questions. A student highlights a line and asks it right there — a question thread anchored to the note. The teacher's reply surfaces inline; the asker is notified, and classmates who had the same question see the answer too. The shy question, asked and answered, without a hand going up.

Every class can have a forum — a per-class discussion board scoped to that subject and section. Mr. Adjei opens one from /dashboard/lms-forums, posts a welcome, and every Form 1A student is notified. A student posts a question about the decimal point and multiplying by ten; Mr. Adjei replies and pins the answer; classmates react.

The walls are real. A Form 2 student cannot read Form 1A's forum — visibility is scoped to the enrolled section, the teacher of record, and oversight roles. A teacher who doesn't teach that class cannot open a forum for it. Students see the forum inside their own course page, under Class discussion; teachers manage it from the dashboard. Everyone posts as themselves — a student can never appear as the teacher.

Each student gets a digital notebook per subject on /portal/notebooks. It has two sections. The Notes section is the class notebook — what the student copies from the board, visible to the teacher and parent. The Private section is a journal only the student can see ("I still don't get step 3 — ask Kofi at lunch").

The teacher's side is /dashboard/class-notebooks. Mr. Adjei designates the Maths notebook as the class default, then sees a roster: 27 of 32 students wrote notes today; five — flagged in red — wrote nothing. He taps a student's Notes section to check they copied the board correctly. The Private section stays closed to him.

Mr. Adjei posts "Quadratic projects" on /dashboard/assignments — instructions, a due date, max marks, optionally a rubric, learning standards, and groups. On publish, every student and parent is notified; a reminder follows mid-week, and an urgent nudge the evening before for anyone who hasn't submitted.

Work can be a group project (teacher-assigned, self-select, or hybrid groups — a student can only be in one group per assignment) with /dashboard/assignments/<id>/groups. It can carry a rubric whose criteria scores roll up to the grade, via /dashboard/assignments/<id>/rubric. Individual students can be granted an /dashboard/assignments/<id>/extensions, and the late penalty respects those extensions automatically. Offline and paper submissions are first-class too — a teacher records them and they count alongside platform work.

A student submits from their portal inbox at /portal/assignments. A plagiarism check runs on submission; late work has its penalty applied without anyone doing the arithmetic. Mr. Adjei grades from /teacher/assignments with inline and audio feedback — and the grade flows straight into the gradebook (Chapter nine), so it counts toward the term mark.

From /dashboard/quizzes a teacher builds a quiz — eight question types, drawn from a reusable question bank filtered by topic, difficulty and Bloom's level, shuffled deterministically per student. Eight-minute timer, proctoring mode. On launch, students are notified.

A student takes the quiz from their own course page — under Quizzes on /portal/courses/<id> — with the timer counting down. The answer key stays sealed: while a quiz is open a student only ever sees the questions and the choices, never which choice is correct, so there is no way to peek ahead. If the internet drops mid-quiz, their answers are held safely and sent the moment the connection returns. And if a student switches tabs or leaves full-screen, that's quietly noted on their attempt for the teacher to review.

The instant a student submits, multiple-choice, true/false and short answers are marked automatically and the score appears; essay answers wait for the teacher. That result does two things on its own: it counts toward the term's assessment marks, and it updates the student's running quiz average that feeds the report card (Chapter nine). Proctored, timed online exams work the same way with stricter anti-cheat for end-of-term assessment.

This is the chapter that makes YESS's LMS unlike any other. After each period, the teacher files a logbook entry on /teacher/logbook — topic covered, objectives, homework, how the class went. The entry is proof the lesson happened, and it is checked against the term's coverage goal (set on /dashboard/lms-settings/coverage-goals) so the school can see, in colour, which subjects are on pace and which are three weeks behind.

The loop closes at payroll. A teacher who is materially behind has their salary release held until they account for it. The teacher files a justification ("lost a week to elections, a week to the science fair"); an HOD reviews it on /dashboard/hod-oversight and either accepts — releasing the pay — or declines. Admins triage the queue at /dashboard/lms-justifications. Every step is tracked end to end: the lesson is logged, students confirm it happened, the school sees the updated coverage, payroll checks it before releasing pay, and a held salary is freed the moment an HOD accepts the teacher's reason.

A teacher schedules a live session from /dashboard/virtual-classes. YESS Live runs the stream right inside YESS — or a Zoom/Teams link if the school prefers — on the same screen, with the same recording. Students are notified with a join link; the recording is saved and linked back to the course topic, so a student who missed the class watches it later. Who attended, and for how long, is captured and flows to attendance.

A school decides how much the LMS counts. On /dashboard/lms-grade-settings the admin sets the weights — assignments worth X%, quizzes worth Y%, capped at a school maximum, with rules like "drop the lowest" or "needs at least three submissions to count." A teacher can use less than the cap, never more.

As assignments and quizzes are graded, each student's LMS contribution is recomputed and staged on /dashboard/lms-grade-contributions, then synced into the gradebook the report card reads. The teacher sees both the raw LMS scores and their weighted contribution to the final mark — nothing is locked away in a submission.

Admins watch the whole school from /dashboard/lms-admin — every course's health, every teacher's pace — and the analytics at /dashboard/lms-analytics surface students at risk before they fail, blending assignment completion, quiz performance, engagement and pace. A teacher can log an intervention and track whether it worked.

The system raises its own flags: behind-schedule logbooks, missing-logbook warnings, at-risk students — all on /dashboard/lms-alerts. Aggregated teacher performance and syllabus-progress reports live on /dashboard/lms-reports, ready to read and export — and you can schedule them to run on their own, notifying the people you choose each time a fresh one is ready.

A teacher publishes bookable office-hours slots from /dashboard/office-hours; a student reserves one. Each booking can open a live session, so the extra help happens face-to-face even when the student is at home.

A parent opens their portal and sees, per child, one honest summary: assignments due this week, anything overdue, recent graded work and the average, recent quizzes, and any logbook approval waiting for them. The parent learns the LMS is working the same day it works — not at the report card.

Once a term: the teacher creates or clones a course, fills modules and topics, publishes — and every section student is enrolled. Monday: post the week's resources and a new assignment; students are notified. Daily: students read notes (read receipts), jot in their notebooks, ask in the forum; the teacher files the logbook after each period. Wednesday: a quiz — taken, auto-graded, contribution updated. Friday: the assignment closes, late penalties apply, the teacher grades with a rubric, and scores sync to the gradebook. Monthly: the admin reads school-wide coverage and at-risk flags. Payroll: the logbook releases — or holds — the teacher's pay. Term end: LMS contributions land on the report card at the school's configured weight.

The screens in this book can be set up in an afternoon. The trust they encode takes a term to feel: that a student's question gets answered, that a parent isn't surprised, that a class isn't quietly abandoned, and that a teacher is paid for work the school can see. Every default leans that way — and every default can be changed, because the authors of this handbook have run classrooms too.

A course is a promise to keep teaching after the bell. This is how YESS keeps it.