Over the years, flex periods have become an integral part of middle school and high school curriculum, given its ability to heighten educational experiences. It allows students to effectively deal with stressful schedules and choose how they want to spend their time. They could work on school assignments to avoid a heavy night of homework, meet with teachers to review content or attend enrichment offerings to enhance their skills.

Though these perks have driven nearly 59 percent of schools in the U.S to implement flex periods, none can ignore the logistical hurdles they introduce. Often, it becomes incredibly cumbersome for them to monitor and manage students’ movement during these hours, as most visit teachers in different classes across different locations within the school premises. Another major concern for schools is creating the correct roster to enable students to meet particular teachers for assistance. For most schools, this process is not only incredibly challenging but also time-consuming, which holds them back from executing their flex periods as well as they want.

Edficiency, one of the leading flexible scheduling software providers in the education space, addresses this demand with its online software that simplifies flex period logistics and allows students to visit different teachers each day based on their individual needs. It further automates the roster creation process and delivers a single system easily accessed by administrators, teachers, and students. “A lot of times in the Ed-tech space, you have solutions looking for problems. But at its inception, Edficiency saw a problem and created a solution, offering a customized tool to create tailored rosters for schools, focused on saving them time from the outset,” states Joseph Connelly, the Founder and Director of Technology at Edficiency.

The company works with individual schools, providing an efficient and streamlined solution to help automate their processes alongside adding more value to their flex periods. Using the Edficiency software, teachers and administrators can create sessions with options of choosing the students they want in any particular session. They can also request to see individual students. Students can log in to the system and request to see specific teachers who can help them improve their academic performance. Once all the requests have been entered into the system, the software analyzes them and places students in the most important session first while assigning the rest of the students to the teachers they know and maintaining the class size balance. After this, every student receives an email that contains all the information of their daily assignments while teachers can log in to view their daily roster. The Edficiency software is device agnostic and can be easily accessed via any device with a browser and an internet connection. This is evident from a recent survey conducted by the company that showed that 94 percent of staff and 93 percent of students agreed that Edficiency was easy to use. Once the sessions are created, teachers, administrators, and students can log in to this intuitive interface and view what is relevant to each user. The sessions mostly contain vital information, including the teacher’s name, the flex period’s location, the session’s title, and the room’s capacity, with the option to specify in-person and virtual settings. Apart from this, administrators also receive an overarching view of everything taking place during the scheduled flex periods while also creating sessions for their school in bulk.