Faculty Manual

Your landing screen as an instructor. It answers one question — what is happening in my classes this week — before you have clicked anything.

What is on it

• Your week — a strip of the teaching week with what falls on each day, so a term deadline you set in September is visible the week it matters.
• Reminders — a private list only you see. Type into the Add a reminder… field and press Enter. Each reminder has a round check button (marks it done and strikes it through), a flag button (priority, turns red) and an × to delete it.
• Since you were last here — recent student activity. Click any activity row to open that student's deliverable directly, rather than hunting for it through the class.
• Every film, and how it is going — each student production in your classes with its current state.

Finding your way back

Once you open a class — or a student's project, or a tool inside it — the Faculty Dashboard is one click away: the Classes button at the bottom-left of the sidebar. This is the single most common thing instructors ask about, because opening a student's Call Sheet fills the screen with that tool and there is no obvious way back. It is the Classes button, always.

A class is a workspace. Everything in it — students, films, rubrics, marks — belongs to that class and nothing leaks between classes.

1. From the Faculty Dashboard, click Create a class.
2. Name it as your students would recognise it on a timetable — Intro to Film Production, not FILM101-F26-sect2. The name appears in their class list and at the top of every grade sheet PDF.
3. Creating the class hands you the invite panel immediately, rather than dropping you into an empty roster and leaving you to find it.

One class or several

Make one class per section you actually teach. Two sections of the same course should be two classes: they have different rosters, and a grade sheet should not need filtering. Rubrics can be copied between them, so setting up the second is quick.

Two routes in, and they are equivalent — use whichever fits how you already talk to your section.

• Email invitations — enter their addresses in the invite panel and send. Each student gets a link that puts them straight into your class when they sign up.
• The class code — a short code (e.g. FILM101) shown beside the class in your Classes list. Put it on a slide. Students enter it when they join.

Both are open the whole term, so a student who adds in week three joins the same way as everyone else. A student can belong to several classes and switches between them from the Classes button.

Opening a class gives you six tabs. Roughly: the first two are the term running, the middle two are how it is marked, the last two are what the class may use.

• Students — the board. Everyone on the roster, what they have been assigned, how much is started, how much is graded, and their average. Expands per student.
• Projects — every film in the class. Expands to its deliverables, where you assign, set due dates and grade.
• Rubrics — one rubric per tool, reused for every student assigned that tool.
• Grading — whether a released mark reads as points, a percentage or a letter, and the letter scale itself.
• Tools — which of the 57 tools this class can open.
• AI — whether AI tagging is available in this class.

Students see none of these. They get two tabs — My Work and Classmates — described in The Student's Side.

Choose the tools your class uses. A first-year class does not need a Music Cue Sheet, and a shorter list is a kinder screen.

The tab lists all 57 tools grouped by department, each with a tick box. Tick a department heading to change every tool in it at once, or use Check all / Uncheck all. Changes save as you make them — there is no Save button.

Unticking a tool hides it from your students' sidebar in this class. It does not delete anything: work already done in that tool is untouched, and ticking it back restores access.

AI tagging reads a scene and suggests breakdown elements — cast, props, wardrobe, vehicles. Whether that is a help or the whole assignment is your call, not ours.

Switch it off if you want your students doing that work by hand, which is usually the point of the exercise. A breakdown a machine produced teaches nothing about reading a script for what a production has to supply.

The setting applies to everyone in this class only. Your other classes, and your own productions outside teaching, are unaffected — so you can run a first-year class with AI off and a thesis section with it on.

You always mark in points against your rubric. This tab is only about what the student sees when a grade is released, and what appears on their grade sheet.

The three schemes

• Points — 18 / 20. The raw mark against the rubric total.
• Percentage — 90%.
• Letter grade — A-, using the scale below.

Pick the one your department reports in. It changes nothing about how you mark — only how the number is presented to the student.

The letter scale

Twelve bands ship by default, A at 93 down to F at 0. Each band is a letter and a minimum percentage: a mark at that percentage or above earns the letter, highest first. Edit either field in place, + Add a band for a scale with more steps, the × to remove one, and Reset to the standard scale to go back.

A rubric belongs to a tool, and the same one is reused for every student assigned that tool. Set your criteria and what each is worth — the total adds itself up.

Building one

Open any tool in the Rubrics tab and add criteria — a short name and a point value each. The total is computed, not typed, so it cannot drift out of step with the rows.

Copying across tools

Open a rubric and copy it to other tools in one step. This is how you set up a term quickly: build the one careful rubric, then push it to the four tools it fits.

Why do this first

The Students board shows an average, and that average is the mean of released marks as a percentage of each rubric's total. Without rubric totals there is no percentage to average, so the column stays empty.

Work is assigned per project, per tool. "Maya, on The Glass Hour, owes me a Shot List by the 14th."

Assigning

On the Projects tab, each film expands to its deliverables. + Assign adds one: pick the tool and the student. The row then appears in that student's My Work and on the Students board.

Due dates

Set a due date on the deliverable. You can do this from either the Projects tab or inside a student's drawer on the Students tab — they are the same field seen two ways, so a date set in one is immediately the date the other shows. There is nothing to sync and no way for the two to disagree.

Overdue

A deliverable past its date that has not been graded and released shows in red, on both tabs and in the student's own list. Once you release a mark it stops being overdue, however late it arrived — the work is in, and a red flag on handed-in work is just noise.

Marking and handing back are two separate steps, deliberately. Nothing you type is visible to the student until you release it.

1. Open the deliverable's Grade action from the Projects tab.
2. Score against the rubric criteria. The total adds up as you go.
3. Add comments where they help — a mark with no reasoning is the complaint students make most.
4. Release when you are ready. Only then does the student see anything.

This split is what lets you mark a whole section over two evenings and hand the results back together, rather than students comparing notes on who got theirs first.

What releasing changes

• The student's deliverable flips to Graded and shows the mark in whichever scheme the class uses.
• The row becomes expandable for them — they can open it and read the per-criterion breakdown and your comments.
• It stops counting as overdue.
• It joins their average on the Students board.

Eleven columns of "who is where". This is the tab to open in a supervision meeting.

The columns

• Name and Student ID — both editable in place. The ID is yours to fill in with whatever your registrar uses; it prints on the grade sheet.
• Role(s) — every crew role that student holds across the class's films.
• Projects, Assigned, Started, Graded — counts.
• Avg — the mean of their released marks, each as a percentage of its rubric total.

The drawer

Click a student to expand them: their films, their crew role on each, and each deliverable with its due date and status. Due dates are editable here, and this is usually the fastest place to give one student an extension without hunting through the Projects tab.

Two exports at the top of the Students tab, for two different jobs.

• Grade sheets… — a PDF per student, headed with the class name and the student's name and ID, listing each deliverable, its mark, and the overall. This is the artefact to hand a student in a meeting or attach to an appeal.
• Summary CSV — the whole class as one table, for your registrar's spreadsheet or your own records.

Both read the class's grade display setting, so a class set to letters exports letters.

A student cannot delete a class film outright. It carries your assignments and your marks, so the person who would lose work is not only the one clicking. They ask; you decide.

What you see

On the Projects tab the film gets a Delete requested flag, and the reason they gave is printed on the row — not hidden in a tooltip. You should not have to hover to find out why you are being asked to delete a student's film.

Your two answers

• Delete — removes the film. Its assignments and grades stop counting toward that student's average.
• Decline — requires a reason, and the reason is shown to the student. A request that silently disappears teaches them nothing, which is how you get the same request again next week.

The student can also withdraw the request themselves if they change their mind. Asking again after a decline clears the old decline and starts fresh.

For the student who drops in week three — and, just as often, the one who drops in week three and re-adds in week four.

Remove on their row takes them off the roster. Their access to the class ends, they stop appearing in Classmates, and they stop counting in the student total.

Their work is kept. Films, deliverables and marks all stay in the class and stay exportable — which is exactly what a registrar needs from someone who dropped in week ten having already earned a grade. The row stays visible to you, flagged Withdrawn.

Restore puts them back, with their films and marks where they left them.

The one destructive action in the classroom, and the only place in FilmDocs.App that asks you to type rather than click.

Delete course sits in the tab bar. The confirmation tells you exactly what is in scope — how many students, how many films — and then asks you to type the class name to proceed.

Everything else in the app confirms with a click, because everything else is one person's own work. This one takes a whole section's projects, submissions and marks out of reach at once, and the people who lose access are not the person clicking. Typing the name is the difference between a decision and a reflex.

From their side it is one step: follow the emailed link, or enter the class code when they sign up.

A student who belongs to exactly one class is taken straight into it. One who belongs to several gets a picker first. Either way the Classes button at the bottom-left of their sidebar is how they get back, and it appears for them as soon as they are enrolled in anything.

They see two tabs — My Work and Classmates. None of your six are visible to them, including Grading: they see the marks, never the settings.

Everything they owe you, in one list, grouped by film. This is the screen to talk them through when they say they did not know something was due.

Each of their films is a group, showing their crew role on it and an Open button. Under it, one row per deliverable with four columns:

• Deliverable — the tool's name.
• Due — the date you set. Past due and not yet released, it reads Overdue in red.
• Status — Not started, In progress once they have put anything in the tool, or Graded once you release.
• Grade — a dash until you release, then the mark.

+ New project starts a film. A student with no films at all sees an empty state telling them to create one so you can assign and grade against it.

Nothing until you release. After that, the mark in your class's scheme, and the reasoning behind it.

The row shows the mark as 18 / 20, 90% or A- depending on the class's Grading setting, and becomes expandable. Opening it shows the per-criterion breakdown from your rubric and your comments.

This is why the Grading tab matters more than it looks: a nineteen-year-old reading 18/20 has to do arithmetic before they know how they did, and still does not know where that sits in your department's scheme.

Requesting a deletion

On a film they created, they get Request delete — with a reason — and can Cancel request while it is pending. If you decline, the reason you gave is shown on the film in their own list, so the answer reaches them without an email.

They cannot request deletion of a film they merely crew on. Asking for someone else's work to be destroyed is not theirs to ask.

The other half of a film class: everyone needs a crew, and they have to find each other.

The Classmates tab lists everyone else on the roster with their crew roles and the films they are on, and an Invite action to bring them onto a production as a collaborator.

Withdrawn students disappear from this list, which is the visible half of removing someone.

Four short films. The first two are yours; the third is what your students are shown.

• Welcome, Faculty (2:19) — the Faculty Dashboard. Plays automatically the first time you land there, and is in Help & Reference afterwards.
• Classroom Management (4:23) — this manual, as a film: setup, rubrics, grading, delete requests. Plays the first time you open a class.
• Welcome, Students (2:06) — what your students are shown the first time they open your class. Worth watching once so you know what they were told.
• Dashboard (4:12) — the production app itself, for everyone.

Every one is re-openable from the ? button in the header, and dismissing one never silences another.

The ones that actually come up.

A student says their grade is wrong / missing

Check it is released, not merely marked. An unreleased grade is invisible to them by design.

I deleted a student's film and their average changed

Correct. A deleted film's marks stop counting rather than counting as zero.

I changed the class to letter grades and a student still sees points

Their page picks the change up when they return to it or refresh. If a mark shows a fraction while everything else shows letters, that rubric has no point total, so there is no percentage to convert.

A student cannot see a tool I assigned

Check the Tools tab — it is hidden for this class.

Can a student delete their own film?

No. They can request it; see Delete requests.

Can I get a withdrawn student's grades back?

They were never gone. Withdrawing keeps all work and marks; the Students board still lists them, flagged Withdrawn, and they are still in your exports.

Where did the app go? I am stuck in a student's Call Sheet

The Classes button, bottom-left.