Approaches to timetabling when each week is different?

[Matt Lambie]

Hi everyone,

I am timetabling for a dental school, where each week is variable. This results in a mix of classes in each course that includes traditional and online lectures, practicals in clinical and simulated settings, dental lab workshops and research lab experiments. 

But each week the content changes, with some courses having a 2hr lecture and a 1hr simulated session, then next week it's 3x lectures and no clinical sessions... to the untrained scheduler it almost appears random. Sequencing and cross-course dependencies also exist. 

My question is: what are the best practices or approaches when scheudling courses that don't conform to any "standard" timetable? Should I consider the course to be a series of events, or do I need to influence curriculum design such that delivery conforms to standard timetabling expectations? 

Thanks for your insights,

Matt

[Tomáš Müller]

Hi Matt,

It is possible to model each class with only a single meeting or with multiple meetings in a single week. The best practice is to have a date pattern for each week, and possibly use the "alternative pattern set" date pattern so the solver can pick the week for the class. Also, when setting up the instructional offering configuration, you can set up multiple subparts of the same type -- a good practice, in this case, is to have all of them with the same number of classes and nested under each other, so when there are alternatives (e.g., two classes per subpart), each student either gets the 1 - 1a - 1b -... or the 2 - 2a - 2b -... combination. Also, additional distributions can be configured in the solver configuration to be created automatically for classes that follow this structure (e.g., require classes to be placed in different weeks).

Please see https://help.unitime.org/faq/splitting-a-class for more information.

Best regards,

Tomas

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