Assigning students to teachers?

Question

Problem

I am currently refactoring an interface where our backend admins can assign a teacher to a specific student or number of students...

The interface looks like this at the moment.

The number of teachers will grow to perhaps 20 or maybe even 30... the list of students will grow an order of magnitude more.

Because of this, I feel the current interface is not ideal.

Ideas

The only way I can think of solving this is by splitting the seletion process into two pages.

Page one you select the teacher you want to assign students to... there can be a list filter to help you find the exact student.

Page two you select the students you want to assign and then submit the form.

Is this the ideal solution or is there a better way?

Answer 1

Consider grouping the students by teacher.

E.g. in a tree-like structure, preferably with drag & drop capabilities. The students that are not assigned would be in a separate list to the right of the tree.

Additionally the reacher nodes could show the number of assigned students, and the student list could be sorted by some order criteria.

Answer 2

I think your problem is the large number of students but you seem to be focussing on dealing with it from a teacher centred view point.

I think you can have a large table with the students with an 'Assign To' dropdown at the top.

The closest example I can think of is the 'Bulk Actions' drop down that WordPress has for posts and pages.

But instead of 'Bulk Actions', you could have 'Assign To' and then in the dropdown list have a list of Teachers.