ScheduleWhiz® Academic includes an intelligent, automated scheduler that searches for the schedule that best satisfies the user's criteria. This automated scheduler can evaluate millions of different schedules. Below are subsets of the information the software incorporates, by category. You may also find it useful to persue the screen shots, by following the "Screens" link in the navigation bar.

Individual Course Information:

• Notes/information
• User-defined categories
• Estimated enrollment
• Credit hours
• Workload units
• Preparation units
• Maximum acceptable range of start times
• Minimum acceptable room capacity
• Date range offered (user-defined)
• Valid number and length of and valid days for weekly meetings
• Valid start times
• Times/days when the course cannot and should not be offered
• Assigned or candidate faculty, including skill level and preferences
• Assign to a specified room, or to a room with required and desired room attributes
• Preferred room assignments
• Ideal building in which to assign the course (optional)
• Maximum travel time should the course be assigned outside the ideal building
• Display color for the Excel(R) and HTML grid reports
• External ID
• Courses that should it should proceed or follow
• Courses that should not be offered at the same time
• Courses that should be offered at the same time
• Courses that should be offered on the same day(s)
• Courses that should be offered on different day(s)
• Courses that should be offered sequentially
• Courses that should be offered in same room at same time (joint-listed courses)
• Courses that should share an exam period
• Courses that can serve as substitutes
• Web-based data collection forms
• Capacity analysis (requires student course-preference information)
• Priority for schedule requests (1-100 scale)

Individual Faculty Information:

• Name & title
• Available and preferred teaching days/times (and unavailable days/times)
• Preferred, minimum and maximum number of teaching days per week
• Preference for consecutive classes (avoid, neutral, desire, desire only if in same room, desire no more than 2 consecutive, desire no more than 3 consecutive)
• Maximum free time in the faculty member's daily schedule
• Minimum time between classes, within a day
• Minimum overnight time between classes
• Minimum and maximum weekly workload units
• Maximum course preparation units
• Importance of the faculty member's requests (1-100 scale)
• Pre-assigned or assignable courses, including skill level and preferences
• Domain (i.e., department or school)
• User-defined categories
• Web-based data collection forms

Individual Student Information:

• Email address
• Preferred courses (and their weights)
• Importance of the student's requests (1-100 scale)
• Foreign ID

Individual Room Information:

• Capacity
• Minimum class size
• Times/Days when courses must not and should not be scheduled
• User-defined Attributes (e.g., audio visual equipment, moveable seats)
• Desirability index (e.g., more desirable rooms are assigned more and larger classes by the autoscheduler)

Scheduling Criteria (User Sets Relative Importance)

• Avoiding conflict between courses that should not be offered simultaneously
• Minimizing student-minutes of travel distance, for courses assigned outside their ideal buildings
• Minimizing room changes for courses
• Minimizing the amount of time that courses are scheduled in their available, but undesired times
• Avoiding room capacity shortfalls
• Maximizing utilization of desirable rooms
• Minimizing the amount of time that rooms are scheduled in their available, but undesired times
• Satisfying faculty members' preferences for their number of teaching days
• Satisfying faculty members' preferences for teaching at their preferred times
• Satisfying faculty members' preferences for consecutive classes
• Maximizing the skill of faculty members in their course assignments
• Maximizing the preferences of faculty members in their course assignments
• Minimizing faculty members' course preparations
• Minimizing insufficient preferred time between courses for faculty members
• Satisfying consecutive class requirements for the Program Groups
• Minimizing differences between the new and the existing schedule

Scheduling Criteria (System Controlled):

• Schedule appropriate courses simultaneously
• Schedule appropriate courses on the same day
• Schedule appropriate courses sequentially
• Assign times/rooms for all courses
• Assign courses to rooms that have the desired room attributes
• Minimizing excess free time in faculty schedules
• Minimizing under- and over-scheduling of faculty hours

Other Features:

• Use as a room scheduler by locking-in course times and days.
• Schedule exams
• Control users' rights to add, edit, delete, and view data
• Schedule faculty meetings at the best times, considering faculty members' teaching schedules
• Ability to lock-in course times, days, rooms and faculty for incremental re-runs of the scheduler
• Schedule courses on different campuses, factoring in travel time
• Import virtually all necessary data
• Printable forms to facilitate data collection on courses, faculty and rooms
• Web-based forms to facilitate data collection on courses and faculty
• Ability to manually edit the schedule in a variety of ways
• Ability to evaluate an imported and manually edited schedules
• Analysis tools to look for conflicts (inconsistencies) in courses, faculty and room data
• Ability to generate and compare multiple schedules
• Over 30 reports that can be viewed, printed, saved or exported to text files, to Excel(R), or as HTML files. A number of these reports include user-selected fields. Printable custom reports can also be created.
• User-defined custom report formats that can be exported, imported and downloaded from the web
• Email faculty and students their individual teaching schedules

Interested? Download a free 60-Day Trial Version.

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