Project going live in 2011/12

The project has reached a significant milestone in that it has been confirmed that the project will go live for the 2011/12 academic year!

The project will go live with 6 of the 16 schools at UCLan, with the remaining 10 manually inputting the data into the new system so all students have an online timetable.   The 6 schools that are going live will have the timetable scheduled by the system.  The project team are currently working with the 6 schools to collect the data required.  The team are also still working with the remaining schools to run more schedules in the test environment to continue testing.

The system has been reviewed by the team responsible for the security of the UCLan systems and although there are one or two minor issues the team are reviewing , the system has been given the all clear.

Our Room Bookings Unit are in the transition phase to become the Central Timetabling Unit (CTU) and are looking at resources available and the structure of the team.  The CTU staff are currently undertaking training to learn how to use the new system and the team are looking at asking Serco to provide some additional training days to ensure the CTU are ready for the go live.

The NSS survey results were released, with Organisation and Management coming out as UCLan’s third worst result.  The Students’ Union have carried out some investigation into this and the students feedback that this was due to Timetabling and timing issues.  Particularly highlighted were the cancellation of lectures at the last minute and lack of communication. The students confirmed that receiving a timetable earlier than induction week would enable them to better co-ordinate other elements of their lives with university such as employment and child care. 

This is hopefully a key area where the project will have an impact.

An early Christmas gift!

The STOP project had a nice Christmas present just before the holiday!  The project team were able to take one of the Schools all the way through the timetabling process; scheduling and rooming their semester 1 timetable and viewing it through ePortal.

This is a significant landmark for the project. The next steps are to look at it in more detail and see how 'good' a timetable it has produced, and of course there are 17 more schools to go...so there is still a lot of work to do.  A significant mile stone never the less!

The project is running on schedule.  There have been challenges in capturing the data from Schools, both in the way the proformas were developed and the timing of the data capture exercise.  However, the project team has managed to collect a large amount of data and have been given some food for thought about how data should be captured in the future.

The training on how to use the CMIS system has gone well.  The only area that the staff felt looked quite complex was student fitting.  The complexity isn’t with the programme necessarily but with the process of allocating students to groups and how this will work with the requirements of the course.  

An interesting transition for the project is developing the Room Bookings Unit to a Central Timetabling Unit.  This is interesting as is will lead to a different role for staff as well as planning how timetabling should work at UCLan with regards to the responsibility of the new CTU and Schools.

We have found the JISC InfoNet Impact Calculator very useful, particularly to create a baseline for the cost of room usage.  It has been more challenging to assess the cost of staff in relation to timetabling.  However we have enough data to allow us to develop educated estimates.