Case Study #3: Faculty Scheduling and Classroom Assignment

ISSUE:

A Dean’s responsibility for faculty scheduling and classroom assignment must balance many different considerations, two of which being the faculty weekly schedule itself and, if facility limitations exist, the efficient use of classrooms. The faculty contract at this institution limited the consecutive daily hours available for any faculty member to teach, and if not teaching remotely, the number of on-campus days required. The available instructional classrooms had different seating capacities, so that certain courses could only be assigned to classrooms with that minimum number of seats. Some method of providing guidance to the Deans was necessary to make this scheduling and faculty assignment process more manageable.

SOLUTION:

In this case, class section data were imported into an Excel spreadsheet directly from a download from the ERP scheduling module, and then pivoted to provide different views of the existing data, depending upon the desires of the college.

Once a master spreadsheet has been created with all relevant course section information, there are multiple ways to present subsets of these data for specific purposes. Below is a weekly scheduling chart, created automatically within Excel. When this tool is executed, an initial pop-up box is displayed, asking the user how the data are to be represented. As seen, the options are to view the information by room, by instructor, by specific course, or even by printed comments. Once the user clicks the desired option button, a dropdown list appears in the textbox from which the user can then choose their specific parameters. When done, the “Create Schedule” button constructs the desired report for a typical week in the semester.

For example, if the user selects a particular room, then the schedule presented displays all course sections that occupy that room across the week (see below). This view is helpful to determine when rooms are unused if new classes must be fit into an existing schedule. In this case, a 2:00pm to 3:15pm slot is available in Room A1333, and there are also available slots on Monday and Wednesday evening. The key at the right gives a visual indication of the status of these course sections, as well as identifying any room conflicts that currently exist (two classes assigned to the same room at the same time). Note that here a class section of MAT-085 is currently “Pending” awaiting approval from administration to be opened for enrollment. These schedules can be printed locally by clicking the “Print” button. Other buttons can be customized to perform other specific actions as desired by the institutional administration. At this institution, printouts of the room schedule for the semester were actually posted by the classroom doors; this way, a quick ad-hoc meeting or consultation could be arranged, knowing the room availability at a glance.

The following schedule was prepared for a specific faculty member. It shows each class assigned to that instructor, as well as the room in which that class is held. If the faculty are required to provide a designated office hour schedule for the semester, these can also be programmed into the tool to give a complete picture of faculty availability for possible meetings or other college activities. Another option is to provide the current enrollment numbers for each class section to assist in determining the need for additional course sections or to make decisions on class cancellations.

Another option for this tool is to display all sections for a particular course on a single weekly calendar, as shown below. This view allows the user to assess if the scheduled course sections provide good coverage across days and times during the week to ensure suitable student access. Note that in this case, the class section enrollments are also given.