The tedious work of creating Class Schedules

Who among you here experienced complaining about your class schedules? The early schedules, the straight classes, the long intervals, the location, the faculty and many more. Well blame that to the class schedulers - the one that makes the class schedules.

I have been a loading in-charge(our term for class schedulers) for our program for almost 8 years and I can really say that this assignment is not easy. It needs time, patience and willingness to adjust to the demands.

Things to Consider

When making class schedules, there are five major things that you should consider, Subjects, Classroom, Faculty, Students and Time.

• Subjects. Every semester there are different subjects that are to be offered for a particular program. A loading in-charge should not offer the subjects not regularly offered for the said semester unless it is an approved requested subject by the students.

• Classroom. In our university, our program has room assignments for laboratory and lecture and as much as possible, we should only utilize those for our classes. But if there are lack of classrooms that's the time we look for available classrooms from other programs. This is the reason why there are classrooms that are far in location.

• Faculty. Faculty sometimes have time preferences due to other assignments. Also, it is a must that you should assign a subject to a faculty which is according to his expertise. The number of preparations, the minimum and maximum no. of loads a faculty should have are very important in making the loading.

• Students. The students have a Study Plan as stipulated in the Program Prospectus. It contains all the subjects that the students should enroll for a said semester. The loading in-charge should make sure that the student's study plan is followed. If there are students who have deficiencies on subjects and they need to re-enroll, they should be advised to request or cross-enroll to other programs.

• Time. All factors mentioned above are related to time. When you put time to classroom, subject, faculty and students, conflicts should be avoided. Also considerations on the time intervals on classes should be considered.

Knowing all of the things to consider. Now let's go to the process that we do when creating class schedules. Although there are automated systems offered and algorithms, we are still making loading in a traditional manner. Here are the processes that we undergo. It is not necessarily in order because we really make adjustments.

• Plotting Subjects to be Offered for a Semester. We go back to the course prospectus and then note of the subjects to be offered. Afterwhich, we put time, look for classroom available and to which faculty it will be assigned. The image below is an example of subjects offered for a particular semester.

  

  

• Request subjects not offered by our program. We make requests for subjects not offered in our program like English, Mathematics, History and we put there our desired time and classroom and they will look for the available faculty to be assigned for the requested subject.

• Finalize the subject offerings. Once all of the subjects to be enrolled by the students are given with time, faculty, classroom. It should be finalized before it will be encoded in our enrolment system.

• Encoding subjects to our enrolment system. When subject offerings are almost final, we encode it, ready for the enrolment of students. But there are really times that there are still changes to schedules even if it is already encoded in the enrolment system.

Here is an example of our Faculty Load. The subjects are listed with the corresponding no.of units, schedules and classroom. A summary report is also included.

Closing thoughts

Making the class schedules is not an easy task. You should bear in mind that there should be no conflict for the faculty, students, classrooms for a particular subject in a particular time. Necessary adjustments are always there, and the faculty load will only be final after the enrolment time because there are still subjects that can be dissolved(subjects with less or no enrollees).

Note: This article is based on my experience as loading in-charge.

Words of Appreciation

I would like to thank all Moms who participated in the Mom's Challenge that I created. To all the kind comments and support, my gratitude.

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