Campus Scheduling in Real Time
Maximizing Resources for Students
December 23, 2010
Nearly every college or university wishes they had more money in their operating budget. One can never have too many books, and the same goes for classrooms, dormitories, athletic amenities and so on. More and more colleges are taking the initiative and making the most out of less than ideal economic circumstances. What they all have in common is the need to get the most out of what they have. Having a few hundred classrooms doesn’t help if students don’t know what time the classes are, or can’t find a room that’s been switched with little notice. Being smarter about allocating resources is a crucial way for everyone — not just college campuses — to keep their belts tight.
It’s important to remember how classroom scheduling usually works: Classrooms are divided according to subject, and then allotted individually to teachers. In places where rooms are more scarce, campus scheduling will rotate rooms between teachers as needed. It’s hardly the most efficient way to make use of space, and in the coming years with the application of new technologies to college campuses, it’ll be downright prehistoric. Thirty years ago, it made sense to group math classrooms away from biological science. Each discipline has a different set of needs: whereas a blackboard can make due for the former, a few amenities like sinks or gas lines are necessary for the latter.
The next generation of digital readers will come with flexible touch screens in full color, offering immersion and learning in ways previous generations would have dismissed as impossible. Rooms can’t change as rapidly as book technology, but with so much freedom offered by technology (libraries can be reduced in size, paper use drastically cut, communication increased, resources saved, etc.) in the coming years, the classrooms will be used differently. Classroom scheduling, the bane of freshmen everywhere, is about to take a great leap forward.
With school scheduling software, campuses can start building a new foundation. If that seems like an overstatement, remember how it felt the first time you waded through the swamp of orientation. Current freshmen are still experiencing those headaches: inconsistent schedules, erroneous information, moved or changed classrooms.
With a better implementation of campus scheduling, an incredible amount of wasted man hours and unnecessary work would be eliminated. For instance, in any given campus, it’s safe to say that most departments operate on and distribute their own calendars. Students will have a calendar for Trigonometry, one for Natural Sciences, and inevitably there will be a conflict between one calendar and another. School scheduling software can offer integrated, school-wide calendars that can reserve rooms, change dates, avoid scheduling conflicts and consolidate the unnecessary repetition. Classroom scheduling goes from a list of paper to an online, real-time program.
Our world is changing faster than we might realize. The idea of a car that can drive itself, for instance, sounds like the stuff of the same future with cars that can also fly. Yet only a few weeks ago, Google announced the successful testing of an automated car that drove itself from San Francisco to Los Angeles and back, without incident, several times. Proponents of automated driving will tell you it’s both safer and cheaper to automate the roads. Eliminating human drivers mean the cars can drive closer together while still being safer. Without human-based traffic patterns, cars can travel in more efficient ways and save money, and still be faster than the traditional method of driving. By automating classroom scheduling, the process benefits similarly. Less people with less paperwork means things are done more quickly and still more accurately than before.
Comprehensive school scheduling software can allow for more classes to be taught by maximizing resources, effectively moving the classes closer together and avoiding classroom booking issues. Instead of peeking through the window to find out what class was being held, students could use a touchscreen LCD display mounted beside the door to find class information. Any professor would tell you the less they’re interrupted, the better it is for the entire class.
Every campus exists to teach. Too often the process of education can become a hindrance to the education itself. Just as the process of driving often involves unnecessary risk, so does the process of attending college. Automating classroom scheduling is in our near future, and like the automatic cars we’ll be riding in, we’ll wonder how we ever got along without it.
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