Resources
Guides and articles on academic timetabling
Practical scheduling guidance drawn from twenty-five years of university deployments. Written to be useful whether or not you ever become a customer — several of these will help you evaluate our competitors more effectively.
Guides
Longer pieces covering a whole topic from first principles.
- How to build a university timetableThe process, in the order it actually happens, with the parts that consume the most time flagged honestly. Written for registrars and timetabling officers rather than for computer scientists.
- Hard vs soft constraints, with real examplesThe distinction sounds academic until you have spent a week overriding your own rules because you declared all of them inviolable.
- How automatic generation actually worksWithout the marketing. What the engine is doing, why the problem is hard, and why the quality of your constraints matters more than the cleverness of the algorithm.
- What to ask for in a timetabling RFPMost timetabling tenders ask exhaustively about features and barely at all about the things that determine whether the implementation succeeds. Here is a checklist that covers both.
Operations
Running a timetabling office: migration, clashes, utilisation, workload and integration.
- Moving from Excel to automated timetablingSpreadsheets are not a stupid way to build a timetable. They are a way that stops working at a predictable size, for reasons worth understanding before you replace them.
- Detecting and resolving timetable clashesMost institutions check for room double-bookings and stop there. The clashes that cause actual damage are the ones a room-level check cannot see.
- Improving room utilisationTeaching space is one of the two most expensive resources a university controls, and the timetable is what determines how well it is used. Most institutions have never measured it.
- Balancing lecturer workloadEvery department has the same argument every year, and it is rarely about the total number of hours.
- Building an exam timetableExamination scheduling is not teaching scheduling with different labels. The unit of analysis changes from the group to the individual student, and everything follows from that.
- Integrating your timetable with your SISIntegration with an unfamiliar external system is the single most common reason a timetabling implementation runs late. It is also the most avoidable, if it is scoped honestly at the start.
Feature notes
Shorter pieces on specific capabilities, expanded from our customer newsletters. Existing users often find features here they did not know they had.
- Timetables on campus digital signageScreens showing yesterday's schedule are worse than no screens, because people stop trusting them and then ignore the one time it matters.
- Linking online classes to the timetableWhen teaching is online or hybrid, the timetable is the natural place to hold the meeting link — and the wrong place to hold it is an email sent in week one.
- Combining student groups for a single classMerging cohorts is routine. Getting the room size right for a merged cohort is where it usually goes wrong.
- Timetable reports for university managementThe timetable is a dataset about how your institution uses staff time and floor space. Most institutions build it, publish it, and never ask it a question.
- Function keys and fast view switchingA small thing that experienced administrators use constantly and new ones usually never discover.
Suggest a topic
This collection grows from questions institutions actually ask us. If there is something you wanted to read here and could not find, write to info_wise@wise-t.com and we will consider it for a future article.
For product questions specifically, the FAQ and the documentation may be a faster route.
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