Course Scheduling Benefits
Supporting Multiple Production Processes
Your course schedule is central to the success of your academic operations. It affects your teaching faculty, your students, your academic offering and your space. How you manage the production of your course schedule influences the quality of the final master course schedule and directly impacts the quality of your faculty and students’ timetables. It also has a great influence on how well you are utilizing your space.
Our course scheduling modules support many ways to manage the production of your course schedule with each approach leading to different results aimed at your institutional objectives. As you adopt different approaches you benefit from building a course schedule that increasingly recognized your students’ needs as well as increase your space utilization. An optimal course schedule will enable your students to progress towards the degree they are seeking in a timely fashion and maximize the use of your space. Ask us how we can help you reach your goals.
Departmental Scheduling
Your departments and your central scheduling office can benefit from Timetabler to support a decentralized production process. Allow departments to build their course schedule with Timetabler DCU while you validate and report centrally. Use Timetabler to dynamically manage change requests and further support departments by clearly demonstrating the cause and effects of the requested changes.
Inform your departments on their resource utilization and capacity for new initiatives by offering accurate and targeted reports. Or help your departments plan their course offering better by providing accurate reports based on centrally run simulations.
Room Scheduling
Space is often at a premium in higher education. What do you do when you clearly have space available at certain times or in certain areas of your campus that traditionally have been used under the guise of specific departments when other departments are bursting at the seams? You can let departments negotiate but you run the risk of creating unmanageable lines of communication and establish unfair practices.
Most institution will make the logical decision to coordinate the allocation of space, at least shareable space, centrally. This approach ensures that space utilization is better distributed and that all departments are treated fairly.
Key benefits associated with this approach include:
- Greater visibility on utilization
- Fair and equitable distribution of space
- Increased space utilization
- Increased operational efficiencies
- Better allocation of room characteristics
- Better fit of section size to space capacity
- Better reporting
Course Scheduling
Institutions have many opportunities to innovate and with today’s technology it is easier than ever to embrace business practices and solutions that yield real positive results. Course Scheduling is one of these great opportunities. With course scheduling your institution has the opportunity to move beyond a room scheduling process and further increase space utilization as well as service students better by offering them the ability to register conflict-free in the courses they want and need.
Course Scheduling is the process of creating an optimal conflict-free course schedule for students, faculty and space. The coordination of this effort can only be achieved by integrating conflict matrices at the student, faculty, and space level while being aware of other course requirements associated with your academic offerings.
The result of embracing a course scheduling approach will yield, amongst other benefits:
- Conflict-free master course schedule
- Optimized space utilization
- Increased operational efficiencies
- Support of institutional rules and policies
- Maximized course distribution
- Streamline student registration
- Increase retention and graduation rates
Student-Driven Scheduling
Is your course schedule perfectly aligned to your student demand? Visionary institutions readily embrace the ability to align their course offerings to their actual student demand and as result offer the right number of sections of the right size at the right time.
As a result, students have greater access to the course they want and need conflict-free. This allows them to progress towards the degree they are seeking in a timely fashion which leads to greater retention and graduation rates. In turn this process increases your ability to accept more students as you graduate your students on time.
Planning your course offering with actual demand and creating a student-driven course schedule will allow you to:
- Align your course offering to actual student demand
- Increase retention and graduation rates
- Optimize master course schedule
- Optimize seat utilization
- Generate individual student schedules (optional)
- Maximize operational efficiencies
Collaborative Scheduling Environment
Our course scheduling solutions support the collaborative environment required to efficiently manage the production of your course schedule and Infosilem is as interested in supporting best business practices as it is interested in developing powerful algorithms.
In partnership with a number of our clients we have leveraged our expertise and developed a Data Collection Utility system to streamline your operations. Timetabler DCU invites the adoption of best business practices by supporting academic departments in their planning and data collection effort. Departmental planning and data entry is done at the source in a controlled environment which increases data integrity as well as enforces accepted scheduling policies. The distribution of the data collection process allows the central scheduling office to focus on the actual planning, analysis and construction of the schedule.
This collaborative environment supports all scheduling processes available with our solutions. Additional benefits associated with the collaborative environment created by Timetabler DCU include:
- Reduced workload within the scheduling office
- Faster academic buy-in
- Early validation
- Control over production timeline
- Elimination of paper-based process
- Increased visibility of cause and effect
SIS Integration
We help you leverage your investment in your IT infrastructure by providing integration capabilities with your Student Information Systems. Our data transfer utility tool facilitates the exchange of data between any SIS and our scheduling solutions.
