The Master Timetable - At this stage much of the information required to create the master timetable has already been entered in School Set Up, Course, Teacher and Student Details. Information such as the number of scheduling terms, structure of the timetable, teacher course and room preferences, minimum and maximum class size, when a course can and cannot be scheduled etc.
Let’s work through the steps of creating a Master Timetable.
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Student Course Requests - Mac School has simplified the process of entering student course requests.
By identifying each student with a specific program, and identifying which courses are required to be taken by a student on a program - the Scheduler can automatically assign required courses as student requests.
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These are the courses this student is required to take on his particular program. Student course requests can also be either:
1) manually entered
2) optically scanned or
3) imported via an ASCII file
The Mac School multi-user environment also allows more than one user to be manually entering course requests at a time. All prerequisites and corequisites are taken into account - historical information for each student is read to make sure each student has successfully met the prerequisites of his/her requested courses.
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Students can choose alternate courses as their second choices in the event of a conflict. These alternatives can either be global alternatives or linked to a specific course.
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This main scheduling window keeps track of the program the student belongs to, the number of student course requests, the number scheduled and the number required to complete the program.
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Set Sections - Once all the student course requests have been entered the Scheduler will estimate the number of sections needed for each course according to the minimum and maximum class size set in Course Details.
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If the set number of sections is too many or too few the system allows for manual override.
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Editing the School Timetable - Prior to the creation of the master timetable the system allows for manual editing of the school timetable.
For example: if you did not want any courses scheduled into Gymnasium first period Monday morning, this is how it would be set.
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Or the coach of the football team wants to make sure he gets his planning period during the last period on Friday. The school would reserve this teacher for the block that corresponds to the last period on Friday.
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Manually schedule a particular class into a certain timeslot. Algebra 12 section 1 must be taught first period Monday to Friday with James Arness in room 106.
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The Lock Class feature allows the Scheduler to create the rest of the timetable around the classes you have already scheduled.
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Timetable Options - The next step of the scheduling process is to set Timetable Options.
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Load Teachers - The Mac School Scheduler uses information entered in Teacher Details and assigns a teacher to every class created by Set Sections. Here the Scheduler determines if you have enough resources to teach the number of sections that have been set.
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Teachers with the highest preference for a course are assigned first. If there are more sections than that teacher can teach, the teacher with the next highest preference will be used as long as his maximum course load will allow it.
Courses that do not have enough available teachers are highlighted and can be edited.
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Create Timetable - The Scheduler minimizes conflicts by building a conflict matrix before it begins scheduling classes.
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After the conflict matrix has been built the Scheduler commences building the master timetable by matching a class, teacher, room and period (or block) together.
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The Scheduler allows the user to save multiple scheduling runs, as well as create an alternate database to be used for scheduling for the following year without harming the existing schedule.
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Editing the Master Timetable - Prior to the assignment of students to classes, changes can be made to the timetable.
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Edit School Weekly is a powerful tool that gives the user detailed information about the existing schedule such that intelligent changes to the master timetable can be made without increasing the number of student conflicts.
Potential difficulties can be identified prior to rescheduling the class.
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Editing rooms and teachers is just as simple!
The following legend details the information stored to assist in constructive editing of the Master Timetable.
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Assign Students - Once the master timetable is built, students can be automatically scheduled according to their course requests.
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The success rate of the schedule can be measured by viewing the number of credits scheduled per student in the main window or by viewing the Performance Report.
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Editing Student Timetables - The Mac School multi-user environment allows multiple counsellors to be editing different students timetables at the same time.
Class overfilling is no longer a problem because the system automatically updates class rosters on all workstations.
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Editing a student timetable is simple - class size is constantly kept up to date and student prerequisite, corequisite and male/female requirements are displayed by class on the screen.
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Reporting - Scheduler reporting options are comprehensive and include the following reports…
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The student timetable can be printed in a number of different formats - matrix format, listing requests, printing blocks, periods etc…
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The Mac School Scheduler has many more features not shown in this presentation, they include the ability to:
• schedule more than one class or teacher into one room at a time
• automatic assign study
• load and read historical information
• identify deficient students
• view class rosters and wait lists
• automatically schedule a new student based on his student course requests
