AWARD-WINNING CLASS SCHEDULING TOOL

CHALLENGE

The client needed a class scheduling tool for colleges and other educational institutions that would automate most operations related to class scheduling and spare their staff from tedious planning processes.

SOLUTION

Our team developed an efficient solution for college class scheduling based on XAF. The system allows university and college staff to:

• Create class timetables using the timetable compilation mode that suits them the best: automatic, manual, or semi-automatic.
• Monitor availability of classrooms, media and IT equipment for classes.
• Assign priority to classrooms, equipment, subjects and course and create timetables according to it.
• Control and prevent classes’ overlaps, support schedules across various buildings and several shifts.
• Create individual study and lesson plans for students.
• Set and monitor more than four dozen KPIs for timetables.
• Create reports on various aspects of the studying process, export data to Excel using special templates.
• Visualize the data in the system and see teachers’ and students' load, usage of classrooms and equipment etc.

This solution also helps to choose requirements that stimulate independent students’ work: the number of practical classes per day, the presence of time intervals between lectures and practice, the allocation of free time for individual lessons, etc. Using the built-in visualization functionality in the system, the user can eliminate violations of the desired requirements by improving the quality timetables.

There is a functionality for working with complex schedules which includes:

• tools for convenient scheduling in terms of individualization of student learning plans;
• functions for working with composite classes;
• intermediate data cache, which can significantly reduce the load on the application database when a large number of information consumers access it;
• integration capabilities by extending the methods of the embedded web service;
• visual forms of displaying the finished schedule, analyzing the workload of the classroom fund, adapted for mobile devices.

The system can be integrated with third-party applications, such as ERP systems or MS Excel for import/export of information from/to them about the classroom fund, faculties, syllabuses etc. The system can be deployed in several ways: - on each user’s computer - on the common server - as a web-service.

RESULT

The college class scheduling tool we developed is already used by more than 60 colleges and universities (some of them having as many as 60,000 students) helping them to create better timetables for their students and teachers and optimize the studying process.

TECHNOLOGIES

.NET, eXpressApp framework, Xafari Framework.