The teaching staff usually spends a lot of time preparing timetables and managing them. EduSwift - School Management System captures all parameters used in creating a timetable and automatically creates one. It also considers availability of teachers and other resources. Moreover, changes can be easily made as and when necessary depending on availability of teachers, substitutes, students, technicians, classrooms and lessons required.
Generating a timetable with EduSwift - School Management System is a five-step process involving:
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Entities definition: As a part of defining entities, teachers' availability and the subjects they can teach is taken into account. Teacher availability refers to the number of days and hours within a day a particular teacher can take a class. Any special situations are also documented. A teacher for instance may be available only for two hours. This special case is then considered when generating a timetable.
Information about physical resources such as number of classrooms, playgrounds, mass prayer hall and laboratories is recorded. Capacity and time availability for physical resources is also noted.
Entity definition further involves counting the number of grades and classes within a grade. In addition, number of students in each class becomes a part of this count. Student details along with group, grade or class they belong to is further collected. Some of this information forms a part of student and teacher profile, but is a core input for creating timetables.
In a nutshell, defining entities gives a clear understanding of school requirements and the resources available to meet them.
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Rules configuration: Once all entities have been defined, relevant rules are configured. These rules are based on the constraints each entity poses. For instance, a teacher may be available only two days of a week, while another teacher may be able to teach English only to fifth grade students. Similarly, a laboratory may be available only for two hours in the morning every Thursday. In another situation, a school teaching multiple languages may require groups of students from different classes to attend the lessons in different rooms. Compilation of all rules results in creating timetables with minimal conflicts.
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Timetable creation: Timetable are generated from data collected and processed in the above three steps.
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Conflicts resolution: EduSwift - School Management System considers all rules when generating timetables. Strict adherence to rules at times creates a situation wherein a specific certain cells in a timetable may remain empty. The user can resolve such conflicts by relaxing some rules, creating new ones or as a last resort manually updating the timetable.
