Hi everyone, any input or guidance is appreciated. I’m trying to feel out if OP would help me with scheduling classes in my department. I am the chairperson of a small academic department of 14 full time faculty and about 10 part time faculty. We “own” about 10 classrooms, and faculty have about 6-10 courses that they teach. Classes have set student sizes and are sometimes fixed to particular classrooms.
I am imagining using classrooms as resources with fixed schedules of availability that can be “checked out” and can provide only so much student “load.” Classes would be assigned to the rooms with possible instructors attached.
Is this making any sense? I am looking to get a better handle on using rooms and being able to identify when rooms are available at what times, as well as digitally tracking relationships between instructors, classes, and their rooms. Right now this is all handled manually by eye balling printed text reports of class schedules.
This is a really interesting use case, and after I finish this post, I’m filing some feature requests, mainly around the room capacity/class size issue. I can’t think of any obvious ‘nope, totally can’t do that’ factors, but I haven’t thought everything completely through yet.
Off the top of my head, class size seems most similar to the way the app handles “Material” resources. And if the classes are defined as Meeting tasks, the class can’t happen unless both the room and an instructor are assigned.
I think the main thing that we could be doing better for your specific use case is triggering a violation if you assigned 11 people to a 10-person room or something similar. As it is, the app will tally up that happening but won’t regard it as a problem. Works fine if you want to know how many gallons of paint to buy, but not as well for your use case. :-)
In case it helps, the app has a built-in two week trial, and folks get tech support during that period just like they do post-purchase. Email support is always available and up to an hour a week of phone support via our 800 number is included, as well.
Ok thanks, this sounds like a promising start. Yes, I see the classrooms as resources that can be “checked out” one at a time, with a “load” of X many students possible. I’ll give the trial a go. Thank you.
