Before users can meet in a virtual session, they need to plan their rendezvous. So far, the laboratory does not support the scheduling of sessions at all. There is also the problem that scheduling of sessions could be of different forms. For example, a fixed group of students want to carry out a laboratory session. Or it could also be a virtual lecture with a variable number of participants. Or perhaps an office hour of a teacher, where it is also unknown how many students will appear.
A session scheduling tool is needed, with which session leaders (teacher or supervisor) could announce and schedule upcoming sessions. Every announced session should be accompanied by session specific information. For example, who is the session leader and what is the reason for the session. Registered participants should be able to sign up for scheduled sessions. The session scheduler should also be coupled with the user profiles to enable users to acquire information about other participating users. It should also be possible for the session leader to remove and add users to the list of participating users. That way, the leader could control the amount of participants. It is especially important in virtual sessions that not too many users are participating.
It is also thinkable that sessions are created automatically according to the scheduled entries and that only signed-in users are allowed to join that session. This would take the burden from the session leader to create every session manually. It is also possible here for users to join the session even before the session leader arrives. This behavior would be similar to traditional classrooms. Students usually arrive before the teacher, sit down and wait until the teacher arrives.