Notifying people
A timetable that keeps itself up to date
Most people already live in a calendar. The useful question is not whether we can export one — everybody can — but whether what they subscribed to in September is still right in March.
- One feed per lecturer, one per room
- The whole academic year, written nightly
- Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar
- Free 7-page manual
A download and a subscription are not the same thing
They look identical the day they are made, and they diverge the first time somebody reschedules a lecture.
A download is a file of what you selected — a week, a term, a year. It is a photograph of the timetable on the day it was taken, and it never changes again. Somebody who was sent one in September is reading September's timetable in March and has no way of knowing.
A subscription is an address the calendar application re-reads on its own. The rescheduled lecture moves in every calendar subscribed to it, without anybody doing anything and without a second file being sent.
Both exist in Wise Timetable, deliberately. The download is the right answer for a one-off — a single week handed to an external examiner. For anybody who will still be here next term, issue a subscription.
One feed per lecturer, and one per room
The institution's server writes a file for every lecturer and a file for every room, on a schedule — most schools run it nightly. Each file holds the whole academic year, which is what makes the address permanent: the calendar keeps re-reading the same address, so nothing has to be re-issued in February and nobody has to be told to re-subscribe.
A lecturer is given their address once, at the start of their first year, and never thinks about it again. Their teaching appears beside their meetings, on their phone, in the application they already have open.
The room feeds are the half nobody asks for and everybody wants. A room's calendar in the caretaker's account, in a departmental calendar, or on a shared screen answers "what is in the big hall next Tuesday?" without anyone opening the timetable — and a building's rooms can sit side by side in one view.
Anybody can also build a feed for a selection of their own from the timetable website: choose the groups, subjects, lecturers or rooms, and subscribe to what is on screen. That route needs no account and no help from the timetabling office.
What a subscriber's calendar actually shows
| In the calendar | Comes from |
|---|---|
| The time and the day | The lesson, at its real times |
| The location | The room |
| The title | The subject — with the execution type and the room where the institution asks for them |
| The detail | The groups, the execution type and the lecturer |
| A joining link | The online meeting address, where the lesson has one, so a hybrid class can be joined from the calendar entry |
Say this to your staff once, and it saves a term of questions
How often a subscribed calendar refreshes is decided by the calendar application, not by us. We publish a file that is always current; Google re-reads on its own schedule, usually every few hours and not on demand, while Outlook and Apple Calendar can both be set to look far more often.
So a change made at nine in the morning may not reach a phone until the afternoon. That is exactly why a calendar feed is not a notification — it is a pull medium, and a pull medium cannot originate a message. For the change that has to be known now, the push notification in the mobile application is the channel that does that job, and it exists because this one structurally cannot.
Both, together, is the honest answer for an institution: the feed so that everybody's calendar is right, the notification so that nobody walks to the wrong room this morning.
Two details worth knowing before you set it up
Give lecturers and rooms codes. The files are named after the code where there is one and after the name where there is not — and the name is folded to plain ASCII first, because these names become addresses that get typed, printed and pasted between machines. A code is short, stable and unambiguous in a URL, and it does not change when somebody marries or a room is renamed.
An institution abroad sets its own time zone, with the daylight-saving rule that belongs to it. With nothing configured the events carry plain local times, which is right for everybody reading in the school's own zone. Where the server is somewhere else — a Gulf university exported from a European machine — the institution states its zone and that statement is honoured exactly, rather than being second-guessed against the server's clock.
Download the manual
- Calendar subscriptions (PDF, 7 pages)Both routes in full, what the scheduled job writes and where, how the files are named and why, what one event contains, the time-zone setting for a school abroad, and a troubleshooting table. Free, and no form to fill in.
- Scheduled automationThe background job that writes these feeds also emails schedules, pushes changes to phones and refreshes signage.
See Wise Timetable on your own data
Book a 45-minute online presentation. We will walk through your institution's scheduling problem, show how Wise Timetable handles it, and answer anything your team wants to test.