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.
