Learning and Teaching Committee

Subject: Timetabling

Origin: Director of Media Services

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The University timetable is very complex due to a number of reasons including: the options available to students which cut across academic departments; the uncertainty surrounding first year numbers in semester one; the special needs which some students have for particular facilities; the availability of staff, particularly external staff. Currently all departments create their own timetables, liaising with other departments as required. The timing of the room allocations is done as late as possible but time needs to be built in for addressing the number of failed requests. The finalisation of numbers close to the start of the semester means that there can be a number of significant problems if numbers exceed expectations. A total of almost 54,000 room hours are allocated to teaching across the two semesters.

Loughborough is unusual in not undertaking timetabling centrally. There was consideration of this 6-7 years ago and a decision was made to maintain the status quo. Since then, the University has become much larger, student options have become wider with increasing cross-departmental options and the PG(T) courses have expanded significantly. The creation of the timetable tends to be the responsibility of one person in each department (even in the larger ones) and this is a risk with significant impact should that person be ill or if they were to leave.

HEFCE have recently produced some reports on space management. They report that savings on space can be made where all teaching space is centrally timetabled. This includes departmental as well as pool space. This would only be possible with an appropriate information system (there are only two major players in this field). This is an appropriate time for the University to be considering this because the information required to feed into such a system will be available through the LUSI student information system.

There have been developments in the software products on the market which should enable the University to specify a system into which departments can enter the parameters for the timetable (e.g. specific timeslots for external speakers, access issues for staff and students). This would overcome some of the problems which people envisage – mostly involving de-personalisation of the process.

It is reasonable to believe that there would be benefits to the University in moving to a central timetabling system which include:

• Later finalisation of the timetable and room allocations enabling final numbers to be more accurately fed in;
• Provision of individual student, staff and room timetables on the web;
• Freeing up administrative time in departments;
• Evening out the use of rooms across the day (not necessarily late afternoon as people fear);
• Resulting in a better timetable for students and staff by cutting out the “failed bookings” which often lead to poor timetables;
• Ensuring that we can allocate PG(T) courses to the new buildings (not possible at the moment due to clashes in the timetables (of the 3901 hours of PG(T) teaching requested by departments, 2295 hours have been allocated into the Stewart Mason and Keith Green Buildings and 1606 hours have been allocated into other rooms because of clashes);
• Risk reduction through the process being undertaken centrally by a timetabling and room allocation team.
• More accurate allocation of rooms – currently about 10% of rooms allocated appear not to be used when we undertake a survey. There are also a number of rooms freed up after the final allocations have been made indicating some holding of “spare” rooms which would have reduced failures in the first place.

There would be costs which include:

• Purchase and ongoing maintenance costs for the software and hardware;
• Additional staffing for the project and for the ongoing service

Following a request from the Strategic Review Working Group, some investigations are being undertaken to assist decision making. This paper is to inform members of Learning and Teaching Committee of this and to seek any comments members might have in assisting in the information gathering process.

Dr Anne Mumford

19^th January 2006