THE SHORT ANSWER:
Being deeply involved in some scheduling work over the past two years,
I have found that the rules about scheduling software parallel an old
adage...
You can have scheduling software with the following properties:
1. it's easy (or fast) to use
2. it can accurately express your school's scheduling needs
3. it will actually work (i.e., produce a schedule you can use).
Choose two. The third will be the opposite of what you want.
THE LONG ANSWER (includes recommendations):
Really it depends what you're looking for the scheduling software to
do. There are several situations schools find themselves in:
1. You know what the "master schedule" will be. That is, you know
which courses will be taught by which teachers in which rooms during
which periods. You just need to be able to plug students into it
based on the courses they need to take.
For this, we use PowerScheduler (a product of PowerSchool, now a
Pearson Education product). This works well for us because it is part
of the whole PowerSchool system which we use to manage most of our
student data (enrollment, directory info, accounts, transcripts, etc.).
2. However, if you need to DEVELOP a master schedule, that's a whole
different ball game. Usually the situation is this: you know which
teachers will be teaching which courses, and maybe you even know which
rooms some of those courses need to be in (science, P.E., and music
tend to have specialized space, for example). You also know the
periods of each of your days. Now, what you want is to FIND OUT is
whether or not there exists a possible way to schedule these courses
into the periods you've got with the rooms you've got. And assuming a
solution does exist, you want to find the most efficient one (or the
one that results in the fewest conflicts for students).
For this, I have not found anything terribly good, and certainly
nothing easy to use. This is for a good reason: it's a terribly
difficult problem to solve (computationally speaking). If you are a
fairly high-tech person** (or you know one who you can swindle into
helping you) and you have some patience and don't mind learning a new
system, I might recommend FET (Free Educational Timetabling
Software) which you can get from here: http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/
FET is pretty versatile for this task, but it is open-source and was
written by a German software engineer so the support is...well, hit or
miss. The developer himself is very active in the online forum for
users of this software and he was able to answer many of my
questions. As you learn how to use this software you will learn a lot
about the German educational system.
I recommend FET over the PowerScheduler product that does the same
thing (I think it's called Schedule Builder) because FET is much more
flexible and allows you build up a schedule incrementally. After a
week of struggling we were not able to get the Schedule Builder part
of PowerScheduler to produce anything, and we couldn't get answers to
our questions from Pearson support. This is what sent me to the
internet looking for alternative solutions.
That's my sad story. Hope you find it helpful.
-Baker
**When I say "high tech person", that probably only applies if you are
a mac school - like mine. I believe FET has readily downloadable
applications for PCs. For macs you have to compile the code from
source using a non-standard compiler. It's a little hairy if you're
not used to doing that sort of thing.
Baker Franke
Computer Science Dept.
University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
773.702.5419
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