Scheduling Reviews and Meetings

Additional integrations / Add-ons

This article is about additional integrations / add-ons that are not part of any Aptem Apprentice package. If you want to use this functionality, please contact your Customer Success Manager. See Aptem Apprentice pricing and packages for information about the packages.

Overview

Customers can schedule and reschedule Reviews and Meetings (Learning Plan Components of type “Meeting”) from Aptem that will be then scheduled and rescheduled in the user’s Teams calendar. The tutor who has scheduled the meeting will be the “Organiser” of the Teams meeting (Component Owner) and the appropriate attendees will be invited via email:

• For Reviews, the learner and employer (Manager & Mentor) will be invited if appropriate (if the review is configured for the employer to “view” the review)
• For Meetings, the learner will be invited

Pre-requisite

Ensure that Teams is enabled on the tenant, and the access policy setup has been completed. For information on how to do this, see: Setting up the Communications Connector with Teams.

Note: If you are interested in getting access to the Communications Connector with Teams, please speak to your Customer Success Manager.

Scheduling a Meeting

In order for a tutor to schedule a meeting in Teams, they need to follow the steps below. In the example below, the tenant is configured to schedule meetings within 5 days. 

1. Schedule a Review or Meeting in Aptem as normal (the meeting has to be at least 3 hours in the future). You can schedule within your stipulated timeframe or you can schedule for the future. In the example below, we will use a 5-day timeframe for scheduling meetings. Aptem will search for meetings to schedule in Teams every 3 hours, so if you schedule the meeting for 30th April, Aptem will schedule this in Teams on the 25th April. If you schedule a meeting and you are already within your scheduling timeframe, we will schedule this instantly in your Teams calendar.
   
   Note: In some cases, tutors schedule a meeting which does not meet the criteria to be scheduled via the Communications Connector with Teams, for example it is outside the scheduling timeframe or 'Meet Online' is not selected. In such cases, when the tutor amends these details to fall within the scheduling timeframe, or selects 'Meet Online', the meeting will be scheduled in Teams instantaneously, and there will not be a 3-hour delay.
2. Ensure you have checked “Meet Online” in the Review or Meeting component:
   Please note, the name of the component will be the title of the meeting invite whilst the description of the component will form the agenda of the meeting invite.

3. You can specify the participant list by selecting attendees (learner, manager, mentor). The list of attendees appears only when Meet Online is selected. Once the Review is scheduled, the scheduled status cannot be reverted, so the toggle will become unclickable. Once the Review is scheduled, the Meet Online flag cannot be removed in the Aptem UI, so the toggle will become unclickable. Note that if the associated online meeting is cancelled in Teams, the Meet Online flag will be removed, and the user can re-check Meet Online and re-select the appropriate attendees to invite.
   If the attendees are changed in the Aptem UI, the attendees in the associated Teams meeting will also be updated. For example, if the Manager is originally invited, and the tutor un-checks the Manager box and checks the Mentor box, the Manager will receive a cancellation via Teams and the Mentor will be invited.

   
4. You will then see that your Review or Meeting has generated a task in your Aptem calendar as normal:
   
5. You will receive an email invite (from Microsoft Teams) as well as see the meeting in your Teams calendar. The component owner will automatically become the organiser of this Teams meeting which will be showcased on the email invite:
   • Please note, Aptem will not be notified if the learner/employer declines the meeting in Teams.
     
6. You will see the Teams URL in your Aptem task for that Review or Meeting. You will also be able to start the Teams meeting from Aptem:
   

Returning OTH hours for meetings

When a learner attends a meeting that has been scheduled in Teams via the Communications Connector with Teams, we can now return OTJ hours for those meetings. The Communications Connector will only return OTJ hours where planned hours have been recorded against a Learning Plan Component. Note: the Tutor (component owner) will always be the “Organiser” of the Teams meeting.
The OTJ hours are calculated in the following way:

• If the Tutor joins the Teams meeting, but the Learner does not join, hours will not be recorded against the component.
• If the Tutor and the Learner join the Teams meeting, the hours will be returned for the exact amount of time the Learner joins the meeting for - for example, if the Tutor joins for 1 hour, but the Learner only joins for 50 minutes, we will record 50 minutes of OTJ hours against the component.
• In the unlikely event that the link is shared with another attendee outside of Aptem and the meeting is joined by the Tutor and 2 other attendees, the hours will be returned for the whole meeting duration - for example, if the Tutor joins the meeting for 1 hour, person A joins for 50 minutes and person B joins for 40 minutes, Aptem will record 1 hour of OTJ against the component.

If a meeting occurs on a different day to which it is scheduled, the hours will not be automatically returned. A note is attached to the associated Meetings component confirming “[component name] hours verified” with the hours attached. Note: this will count as evidence toward component completion, and could lead to the component being marked as complete depending on the setup of the component.
The attendance verification process is run overnight, meaning the attendance will be returned and off-the-job hours are verified 1 day after the meeting was scheduled.

Notes

• Meetings and Reviews that have previously been flagged as “Meet Online” (or “Use Zoom” to use the old terminology) will not need to be created/scheduled again. Aptem will pick up those meetings during the first “schedule” job (as long as they are within the stipulated time frame).
• In case of specifying the participant list by selecting attendees, the list of presented options depends on the review type settings:
  • if Participant Can View - Learner option is presented.
  • In case a manager and/or mentor are present, then:
    • if Employer Can View - Manager and/or Mentor options are presented.
• To reschedule or cancel reviews and meetings, see: Rescheduling and cancelling Reviews and Meetings.

• The Teams API will add the meeting in the appropriate time zone in your Teams calendar, and will invite learners to the time set in Aptem. However, when you open the meeting, Teams defaults to the UTC time zone. You can adjust the time zone if required here.

  • Meeting scheduled 9-9:30:
    

  • Upon opening the meeting the time zone is displayed at UTC, so is showing 8-8:30: