Timetabling

What really sets o! apart is the ability to truly optimise resource utilisation, all within the framework of user-specified constraints and zero-clash solutions. Better use of time and resources can lead to substantial benefits for the entire organisation.

Student satisfaction and corporate image
Educational institutions provide a valuable and complex service to literally thousands of students, whose satisfaction can be one of its greatest assets. For students, timetables control almost every aspect of their education : Which subject combinations can be enrolled for, what the weekly workload is like and even what the distribution between academic and personal time looks like. Exam timetables with poorly spread papers can seriously impede academic performance, while clashes could mean an extra semester or year to finish a degree.

Students often complain about time wasted to sort out the administrative side of academic study. Student-friendly timetables that are always current and easily available on the web can save a lot of time and improves the perception of student-oriented service. With o!Timetabling products, teaching logistics are taken care of to ensure efficient and uninterrupted teaching cycles.

Staff
Staff members are also affected by academic timetables : They need to find a balance between time for teaching, research and general administrative tasks. Many departments employ staff members who have off-campus career responsibilities and very constrained personal timetables. o!Timetable allows blocking times for such staff members, while their teaching load will be spread evenly over the available days and periods. For staff members who are responsible for more than one subject (even from other faculties), o!Timetable ensures that there will be no clashes.

An often overlooked problem is how traditional timetables impact negatively on the effective application of skills and knowledge. Many institutions have fixed timetables where departments must allocate work not according to the skills available, but rather to the slots that the timetable allows. If the best lecturer for a subject cannot be on campus on Mondays, but the subject is on Monday, another staff member will have to teach that class.  With o!Timetable, departments decide which staff members should teach what, and the classes are placed to allow them to do so.

Administration
Administrative departments often end up with the difficult task of making timetables fit the needs of the academic departments, who feel that administrative principles and concerns should not be allowed to interfere with day-to-day teaching activities. It is often a case of balancing management's need for efficiency with the academic  requirements within faculties.

o!Timetabling products bridge this gap between academic and administrative needs, by allowing departments to enter their requests, requirements and preferences themselves. In this way, departments take ownership of their timetables within the broader framework of institution-wide needs and constraints, as prescribed by management. By using the planning and modeling capabilities of the software, administration can quickly see the effect of potential changes in curriculums or teaching times, and identify problem areas within the current structures.

Timetablers
Timetablers and timetable committees usually 'evolve' through time to the point where they alone know the full extent and complexity of the task of timetabling. Students and staff are often unaware of the amount of time and work that timetablers spend to arrive at a final working timetable, while timetablers know that their work is never finished. For every working timetable, staff members and departments will always have change requests and complaints that must be taken into account for the next version of the timetable. If the timetabler is also an academic staff member, he or she will spend more and more time resolving conflicts or working on changes, and have less time available for teaching and research.

o!Timetabling products can greatly reduce the time and effort spent on creating and managing timetables. Because the data collection is distributed to the departments who know exactly what their own needs are, the collection time is reduced and the need for an outside person to 'negotiate terms' is eliminated in most cases. The powerful mathematical optimisation engine at the core of the Optimiser can pack timetables for thousands of contact sessions in a matter of minutes, while drag-and-drop changes can be made with the Rebuilder tool. There is also no need for a single timetabler to remember every request and preference, as this data is conveniently stored in a database, ready for use in all future timetables. For exam timetables, the bulk of the data is downloaded directly from existing systems, and it has been possible to create a completely clash-free and optimised exam timetable for about 20,000 students in less than 2 days.
 

Resource Logistics
Academic timetables assign resources to teaching activities, and represent the most accurate measure of how efficient the organisation is in terms of utilisation. Where resources are scarce or expensive, an improvement of just a few percent could result in substantial savings. o!Timetabling products are designed to optimise venue utilisation for both class and exam timetables. For class, the emphasis is on using maximum capacity for continuous periods, resulting in better utilisation of space. In some cases, it might even be possible to reduce the number of venues used, so that others can be made available for rental. The system can be used to generate utilisation statistics, or to model the effect of planned buildings on the timetable. For exam timetables, the number of venues and invigilators can be reduced by minimising the number of papers that are split across multiple venues.

By utilising venues in continuous blocks, energy expenses can be reduced as well. Air conditioning and lighting can be switched off when there are no classes, while continuous blocks reduce the number of times air must be re-cooled.

Re-use data
Once all the data has been collected and a timetable made, there is no need to repeat the entire process for the next academic cycle. All constraints and requests can be rolled over to the next year, so that the users only have to check existing data for correctness. In most cases, the only real changes from year to year will be the work distribution within departments. Any new lecturers can be added to the system, while possible clashes can be identified and resolved with the Rebuilder.

For institutions that wish to re-use exam timetables, actual registrations can be compared to the timetable to identify possible clashes, which can then be resolved.

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