Maintenance
Substitutions and cover
A lecturer calls in sick at half past seven. You have ninety minutes to find cover, decide whether the class runs at all, and tell three hundred students — and none of that is a timetabling problem you can solve by regenerating.
The daily problem, not the annual one
Most timetabling software is built around the annual cycle: collect, generate, publish, done. But the timetable is a living document, and the work that consumes an administrator's morning is absence, cover, room changes and cancellations.
Wise Timetable treats substitution as a first-class operation rather than as an edit to the master schedule. You are not rebuilding anything; you are recording that this specific session, on this specific date, is being handled differently.
- Record an absence and see every session it affects, immediately
- Find which qualified colleagues are genuinely free in that slot
- Assign cover, move the session, or cancel it — whichever is right
- Substitutions recorded against the date, leaving the master timetable intact
- Everyone affected notified automatically, by email and push notification
Finding who is actually free
The hard part of arranging cover is not the paperwork. It is knowing, at speed, which colleagues are free at that hour, are not already at their daily teaching limit, and are plausible substitutes for that module.
Because Wise Timetable already holds every lecturer's schedule, teaching load and submitted availability, that question is answered in a few seconds rather than by a round of telephone calls. See availability checking.
Telling people in time
A cancellation nobody hears about is worse than the cancellation. Substitutions and cancellations trigger the same targeted notification machinery as any other change: email to the lecturers involved, push notifications to the affected student groups in the mobile apps, and immediate updates to published web pages, calendar feeds and campus signage.
Students who subscribed to their timetable in Outlook or Google Calendar see the change there too, without doing anything.
And a record afterwards
Substitution data is worth having. Which modules lose the most contact hours, which cover requests could not be filled, and how much unrecognised cover teaching individual staff are absorbing are all questions heads of department eventually ask, and normally cannot answer.
Because every substitution is recorded against the session rather than typed over it, the history is reportable. See reporting.
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.