Consider student course requests when scheduling teacher/classes - or better analysis
This is my first year to use Schedule Maker and I was shocked to learn that student course requests are not considered when generating the Master Schedule to minimize conflicts. If I understand correctly, I need to generate the Master Schedule and then generate the student schedules, filtering to see the conflicts in one of the views. Once I see a trending conflict, I can manually adjust the Master Schedule and regenerate the student schedules. While this is something that would normally be done, I feel that I am lacking the proper tools to make the best decision for the student.
A report that analyzes the student data to identify common classes amongst students in a particular class would be beneficial. Or identifying what common free times students in a particular class have to better place the conflicting class.
If these already exist, I have not yet been able to find the documentation that walks you through the process of conflict resolution when generating the schedule.A report that analyzes the student data to identify common classes amongst students in a particular class would be beneficial. Or identifying what common free times students in a particular class have to better place the conflicting class.
Scheduling is, by nature, a process that requires thoughtful human intervention. Tools to better that process are a plus.
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Peggy Lehman
- Dec 6 2017
Related ideas
I agree. We are a small school. The difficult part of our scheduling process is avoiding student schedule conflicts. The master schedule maker should consider student enrollments when assigning classes to blocks.
Agreed. I see Peggy's updated comment below that the process incorporates requests--but I am not confident about this. KB #119618 seems to indicate that the priorities are teacher & room availability only. The process seems designed for schools with large teaching staffs where the first thing that needs to be done is to assign teachers to each class that needs to be taught. That is NOT our issue--we know in advance who will be teaching all sections. We need a process that will prioritize student requests to help use arrange sections for to minimize student schedule conflicts. In my experience with this software, I have to do that myself.
After using Schedule Maker and being reassured by others that it does utilize the course requests, I would like to modify the idea. I would like to see better documentation on how the system works that includes suggestions for handling complex schedules. It isn't too often that you find too much information on how to use a product.
Peggy