Academically Driven Timetables
Timetabling production at Leeds runs in a disconnected way with scheduling decisions being made in Schools to produce a timetable for module enrolment. Student enrolment data is then added to the timetable post enrolment and attempts are then made to resolve the problems caused. Despite this approach it continues to produce individual timetables for thousands of staff and students every year and manages the challenge of equitably distributing the limited teaching space resource against a myriad of competing demands. With a restructuring of the order in which timetabling is carried out It could be improved and in doing so move from the disjointed approach where different data elements are imported into the timetable and the problems this creates are resolved retrospectively, to a more efficient model of timetabling based on all the information being available to guide the scheduling process. This provides the University with the opportunity to address all the challenges the timetable faces whilst retaining a high level of local control over timetable production. Proposal The current timetable process has been in operation for over 10 years. Significant analysis has been done into the challenges it faces and how the difficulties of constructing a timetable could be averted using a different model or approach, and this will not be revisited in this document. The primary outcome from this research has always recommended a more centralised auto‐scheduling approach to the timetable production. This model has never been adopted despite evidence from peer institutions suggesting there are many benefits. There are many reasons behind this but the most significant is the major challenge of culture change around the loss of control over timetable scheduling. This paper describes a new approach to producing the timetable which ensures this high degree of control and autonomy is retained by schools, but moves the timetable to a position where intelligent scheduling decisions are made based on the best quality data available at the time. To achieve this goal does not require a significant amount of work in terms of systems development or altering how enrolment operates, but it will require an acceptance of certain fundamental principles of timetabling construction, a willingness to accept that some flexibility will be required in the timing of academic activities, and a understanding that the timetable is constructed using finite resources. Altering the timetable production and timeline will allow the University to address two key
delivering teaching and a changing expectation on the part of students that if they have paid for a certain course to be delivered they expect to be able to attend the required teaching activities. The second is the altering of the structure of Programmes as part of the Curriculum Review to incorporate the developing streams. This change to the delivery of full year modules, coupled with a significant amount of time spent away from the students original degree course studying within the stream elements, means a restructuring of the timetable will be required to accommodate this. Providing timetablers with the ability to reschedule based on accurate timetabling data will solve these two problems by applying the simple premise that activities are now scheduled at a time when staff, students and appropriate teaching space resources are available.
Key changes to the process The key elements of the new process and timeline are outlined below. ‐ A definitive end date to Online Module Enrolment. In order to produce a stable timetable, with minimum disruption once students have enrolled, a definitive end date to OLE will be required. This will stabilise the data used for timetabling and allow a timetable to be constructed which is not subject to fluctuations once the activities have been scheduled and rooms allocated. The deadline for submission of module choices will need to be carefully communicated to students, along with a detailed explanation for the reasons behind it. This is a common feature of other comparable institutions module enrolment procedure so is not an unreasonable alteration to the Leeds process. ‐ Students no longer refer to a timetable whilst choosing module combinations. If a programme offers a student a choice of a module as per the Programme catalogue and it is academically viable for a student to take the module, then the student should be able to study that module. Currently students are able to make these sorts of choices during OLE and the number of clashes on the timetable suggests they do so with no reference to the available timetables. ‐ Activities will be scheduled in a specific sequence by school timetablers. To ensure efficient equitable use of the finite teaching space resources school timetablers will be asked to schedule bands of activities in a particular predetermined sequence. One option is to group together activities by size and allocate teaching rooms based on this information. This will allow the larger more constrained lecture theatres and spaces to be used first, thereby avoiding large activities appearing at a late stage of timetabling construction when no suitable rooms are left to allocate. An alternative to scheduling by size would be to introduce a complexity ratio. The complexity ratio is a means of assessing how hard an activity is to schedule taking into account quantifiable details such as size, the type of activity, and the availability of suitable teaching space as required, etc. This would produce an ordered list of activities to schedule by, which would address some of the potential issues caused by smaller but more complex activities being over looked in favour of larger activities in the initial rounds of scheduling. To ensure the scheduling is carried out in the correct sequence regular comparison reports will be produced to help the Timetabling team understand how schools are progressing, and where to offer assistance if required. It will be necessary to ensure whichever sequence of scheduling is chosen that it is abided by to achieve as much equity in the timetable as possible. To ensure this is the case within a School there must be a clearly defined authority for making scheduling decisions regarding activity timings, and once this has been exhausted the Timetabling Office must have the authority to schedule activities to ensure their inclusion on the timetable. ‐ Room suitablities will require a review. It will be essential to overhaul the suitabilities available on the timetable to ensure when timetablers are allocating suitable space the requirements they have can be met. Using suitabilties in conjunction with tighter zoning will help avoid situations where activities are scheduled in rooms away from the parent
‐ Zones will have to be redefined. As schools are allocating their activities rooms as part of the scheduling process, rather than differentiate between schools own rooms and centrally owned rooms, zones will need to be configured as concentric selections of rooms. As activities become increasingly harder to schedule in the schools Zone 1 this is altered to Zone 2 giving a wider selection of available rooms. Depending on the size of the School and the expected enrolment numbers the zones will vary widely and require a mixture of teaching space that fits the Schools needs. ‐ Timetabling and Room bookings office role in the production of the timetable will change. Instead of controlling the allocation of resources to the pre‐scheduled activities, the role will change to one of assisting timetablers to find the rooms they need at a time that fits their requirements. This will involve training users to understand the information they are presented with as well as being able to manipulate this in the timetabling software. ‐ The process of timetabling will alter. Rather than schools timetabling activities in an ad hoc fashion, the timetablers will be presented with a report establishing which activities are to be scheduled in a particular sweep of allocations. Depending on the size of the module and the number of enrolments some schools may have more or less activities to schedule in each size band. Timetablers will be able to schedule their activities where resources are available, however some flexibility will remain and allocations can be swapped around to ensure sensible room allocations are made. ‐ Caps will be required for modules which improve data stability. The aim of providing a distinct end of module enrolment, restricting the pathways and credits a student can enrol for, and providing academic guidance on the module choices a student makes, is to build in greater stability to the module enrolment data and reduce the requirement for large scale module changes around the start of semester one. If changes are necessary to students module enrolments then consideration will have to be given to how to handle significant changes to a modules size that potentially could lead to a teaching activity exceeding the capacity of the room it has been allocated to. To prevent additional student s who have changed or chosen modules after the first round of module enrolment causing an activity to exceed the capacity of the room it has been allocated, a cap needs to be placed on the module to restrict the number of additional students, or the school enrolling the additional students in excess of the capacity of the room must accept that potentially the activity in question will have to move from its scheduled timeslot to ensure a suitably sized room is available. These changes to the process of timetabling are designed to maximise the students access to the wide variety of modules offered as part of many degree programmes, improve the scheduling decisions made at school level regarding when activities occur, give greater consideration of the universities resource availability, whilst maintaining the autonomy of the School timetabling unit to allocate academic staff to activities at a time of their choosing.
Complexity Ratio for scheduling Complexity Ratios are a means of applying a weighting to an activity that requires scheduling that then determines the order in which that activity is scheduled. With the correct weighting activities with large numbers or complicated room requirements are dealt with first and easier more flexible scheduling is done later in the process. This prevents the timetable from being put in a position where it is required to reschedule activities in order to deal with an overlooked activity that needs unavailable resources. Factors to take into consideration include the Size of the Activity, Duration, Activity type, Complex room requirements (such as consecutive Activities in the same room), and scarcer Room Suitabilities. These are given scores depending on the nature of the factor and total score for an activity determines its order in the scheduling process. Suggested scores for consideration are as follows. To be considered as part of the timetable workshops
Room and Resource Allocation Current timetabling practice separates the scheduling of the Activities from the allocation of the resources available. This has historically been done in an attempt to provide an equitable allocation of resources and prevent a ‘first come first served’ race to schedule Activities which could potentially lead to inefficient room usage. To develop the process of scheduling to incorporate the allocation of a suitable room at the time of scheduling will mean changes to the zoning of rooms, the suitabilities used to describe them and the order in which they are allocated via scheduling. In some areas of campus priority booking has emerged as a means to ensure students and their activities are located as closely as possible to the home school. This situation will change and rather than maintaining priority allocations timetablers will have their current priority rooms in their Zone one. To ensure exclusivity no other school will have these rooms in Zone 1. As allocations progress priority users will then schedule these rooms as their preferred choice of teaching space, with the intention of maximising the amount of teaching occurring in this local space. Once the space has been filled then the school will move onto next Zone and continue to schedule in these rooms. This method of including priority rooms in a schools primary zone helps to make the allocation and ‘ownership’ of space more equitable. All schools will have a Zone 1 into which they will attempt to schedule as many of their activities as possible. This will ease the potential ‘competition’ for space in a system that requires them to schedule activities at the same time as allocate rooms. Timetablers will aim to complete as many activity allocations in their Zone 1 as possible. As they exhaust the possibilities in this zone they will alter the zone the activity is associated with, expanding the selection of rooms they are allocating too. In their Zone 3 (or beyond – perhaps in a Zone CTS) is a general pool of teaching space rooms and this is used as a last resort once all other zoning options have been exhausted. The closer matching of rooms to actual activity size, combined with a scheduling decision made on genuine student availability and a structured allocation process where larger more complicated activities are allocated suitable rooms first, should lead to less pressure on teaching space at critical times. The current timetable process allows two inefficiencies to be built into it. Firstly the current room allocation process works on class sizes estimated by schools. These invariably are larger than the actual size as schools hope for significant enrolment numbers which may then never materialise. There is incentive to ask for an alternative room when the class size has exceeded capacity but the same reallocation does not occur when activities are far smaller than the allocated space, unless it is consider academically unsuitable for a small class to be in a large room. Anecdotally classes have been allocated to space with a capacity that greatly exceeds the size of the class on the basis that this is preferable to moving times of an activity. To prevent the use of space which is far larger than the allocated activity a restriction could be applied to activities where rooms are allocated on a maximum of real size plus 30%. This would give activities some flexibility in where they were scheduled but would prevent the use of disproportionately large rooms. This figure will allow for example activities reaching capacity in a 94
seat Roger Stevens Building Lecture Theatre to be scheduled in the next band of room sizes in the building but prevent them occupying one of the scarcer larger rooms. This figure will prevent any activity but the very largest being scheduled into the Conference Auditorium and this is potentially desirable as it keeps a very unique resource as free as possible for any first year activities that are subject to enrolment fluctuation. First year/JY/Erasmus student numbers are not known prior to the start of timetable scheduling which presents unique problems in trying to determine a realistic and fair activity size that allows for a sensible room allocation, but is not so generous that large sized rooms are allocated to activities which then fail to enrol as many students as predicted. Determining an appropriate activity size/module cap is further complicated where new modules are introduced and there is no precedent to work to. This applies equally to modules introduced at all levels of study. To ensure estimates of class sizes are realistic a suitable cap can be calculated for modules based on previous years enrolment plus 10%. This allows for some flexibility in enrolments but ensures predicted numbers do not escalate. It would also be sensible to bear in mind the capacity of the rooms that area available in certain size bands. Module caps for new module where no previous data exists should be within a defined band so timetablers are able to determine room allocations within sensible limits, and not jeopardise their opportunities for securing suitable teaching space within their requested zone. Appropriate bands/Module cap could be considered as follows
Capacity Number of rooms Suggested module cap
<350 & >550 1 rooms in CTS 550 300‐350 6 rooms in CTS 300 200‐259 13 rooms in CTS (more including School owned space) 200 160‐196 20 rooms in CTS (more including School owned space) 160 96‐136 17 rooms in CTS (more including School owned space) 96 80‐94 25 rooms in CTS (more including School owned space) 80 50‐78 24 rooms in CTS (more including School owned space) 50 40‐49 21 rooms in CTS (more including School owned space) 40 30‐32 19 rooms in CTS (more including School owned space) 30 26‐28 26 rooms in CTS (more including School owned space) 26 20‐25 32 rooms in CTS (more including School owned space) 20 10‐18 49 rooms in CTS (more including School owned space) 10
Timetabling methods In order to schedule effectively a variety of scheduling models can be adopted depending on the requirements of the school or timetabler. The advantage of the proposed timetabling model are all lead to the same result, and all can be used by the same school for different parts of their timetable depending on time, circumstance or requirements. All models operate under one fundamental principle and that is regardless of the method of timetabling used, the timetabling of an activity in a band must occur during that bands scheduling window to ensure suitable teaching space is provided. Once the timetable has been finalised school timetablers will be free to adjust the times and locations of their activities to suit, but to guarantee a suitable room in the first round of scheduling an activity must be timetabled as part of the guided sequence. It is proposed that should a school miss the appropriate scheduling band either by agreement or due to unforeseen circumstances the Timetabling Office is given the authority to schedule any outstanding activities in a band. This would prevent an activity being left unscheduled on the timetable which could then disrupt the allocation of resources to subsequently scheduled activities. In all cases, where scheduling was being undertaken due to unforeseen circumstances, contact would be made with the programme or module leader to inform them of the situation. The methods for timetabling are detailed below along with a suggested application; 1) Schools manually schedule all activities. Schools retain full control of the timetable construction and determine when their activities are going to be taught taking into account resource availability and student enrolments. This method is the closest to the current method and is suitable for any activity. 2) Schools manually schedule some activities and auto‐schedule the remainder. Schools could choose to manually schedule a selection of activities that they wish to retain control over (e.g. lecture activities). The remainder of the timetable could be constructed using the auto‐ schedule tools in Syllabus Plus, particularly where there are multiple activities covering the same subject matter (e.g. seminars) 3) Schools manually schedule some activities and Timetabling auto‐schedule the remainder. Schools could choose to manually schedule a selection of activities that they wish to retain control over (e.g. lecture activities). The remainder of the timetable could be constructed using the auto‐schedule tools in Syllabus Plus, particularly where there are multiple activities covering the same subject matter (e.g. seminars). This would require the School to provide data they wished to be considered in the auto‐scheduling – primarily the availability of staff. 4) Timetabling manually schedule all activities. This would require Schools to provide data they wished to be considered in the scheduling – primarily the availability of staff. 5) Timetabling manually schedule some activities and auto‐schedule the remainder. This would require Schools to provide data they wished to be considered in the scheduling – primarily the availability of staff. 6) Timetabling auto‐schedule all activities. This would require Schools to provide data they wished to be considered in the scheduling – primarily the availability of staff. Each of these methods produces the same end result so each stream could be adopted for different schools, parts of the timetable or for different types of activities. This flexibility of methods is key to retaining the scheduling flexibility schools currently have.
Timetabling for non‐returning Students Students who fall outside the category of returning UG students pose alternative challenges for timetabling which must be considered in any planning to ensure an equitable distribution of resources at suitable times. The students affected by this category are generally 1st year UG, JY, Erasmus and PG Taught students who all currently have slightly different requirements for module enrolment. First year students pose a significant challenge for the University timetabling process. The variety of courses and the choice within them means collecting meaningful information regarding their module choices is practically impossible prior to the start of teaching. Even after teaching starts Elective Module choices mean students are changing modules well into the first four weeks of semester. To address this challenge either the status quo should be maintained with some control over the pathways being planned for being built into the timetable, or as part of the Curriculum Review a decision should be taken on whether it is appropriate for first year students to have any optional (and elective) choice at all, given they are embarking on a degree programme with no prior knowledge of how the different pathways will lead to a chosen degree. ‐ How will first year students be timetabled? In order to plan for the unknown module choices, the timetable can be constructed with Schools choosing a selection of predetermined pathways based on a selection of optional modules they would prefer the students to study. These can then be timetabled to remain clash free and as the students enrol they can be assigned to the modules included in the pathway. To ensure stability with this model it will be necessary to establish caps on the number of enrolments which are then enforced to prevent activities exceeding the capacity of the rooms they have been allocated to. ‐ Would it be possible to restrict first year students or have no choice of modules or Programme Streams? Because of the difficulty in establishing student module choices, and making sure they make good academically suitable module choices prior to starting at university first year students could have a selection of modules predetermined for them as either part of their programme of study, or as part of the themes emerging from the Curriculum review. To replicate the same data as returning students, Pathways will be created which include the core modules for a particular programme. Schools will then be able to create a selection of pathways which include the optional module choices they consider to be a suitable selection to offer on a clash free timetable. Technically it is possible to include all module choices but the reality of this would be a timetable that was practically impossible to schedule due to the constraints on it. ‐ Erasmus and JYA students use the timetable as per normal. Students enrolling as part of the International Office programmes currently do so late in the year for the selection of modules they undertake, and as such are expected to accommodate their studies around the academic provision that has already been timetabled. Unless it is possible to capture the data relating to their module choices in line with the returning students, they should be
guided to consider the timetable as part of their enrolment process with an emphasis being placed on ensuring they understand that self induced timetable clashes are not acceptable. ‐ PGT Students are timetabled using data captured during Online Module Enrolment. Potential PGT students module enrolment details, in particular their compulsory modules, can be used within the timetable to construct a structured individual timetable in the same way as returning students. However consideration must be given to the potential variance in actual numbers enrolled as students often do not commit to their courses until late in the enrolment timeline. With this in mind the improved room availability due to better matching of class size to location and spreading of the teaching week will help provide the flexibility needed to accommodate classes of unknown size.
