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.
- Four ways to publish a timetable, and who each one is forA link, an embed, a calendar subscription or an app — what each is good at, and why publishing is not notifying.
- Driving Wise Timetable from the keyboardThe keys that turn three interactions into one, several hundred times a week — and the type-to-search that works in every list.
- Changing timetabling system: what actually has to moveWhat transfers, what has to be rebuilt, what quietly breaks outside the software, and a realistic timeline. Written to be useful whichever system you move to.
- How long it takes to get a timetable liveWhat takes days, what takes weeks, which stage actually dominates the calendar, and why year two is so much shorter than year one.
- Syllabus Plus, term by termScientia built a vocabulary nobody else uses, and an institution that has run Enterprise Timetabler for fifteen years thinks in it. This page translates it, so that an evaluation is about the software rather than about the words.
- Untis, module by moduleUntis is the most widely used timetabling software in German-speaking Europe and it was built around the school timetable. Most of it maps directly; one part of it does not, and that part is the reason universities look elsewhere.
- CELCAT, module by moduleCELCAT and Wise Timetable are built on the same British academic conventions and much of the vocabulary is shared already — clash-free, constraints, resources, registers. This page covers the parts that are not.
- TimeEdit, module by moduleTimeEdit names its modules in single words and Nordic institutions prefix them — TE Core, TE Reserve, TE Viewer. This page says what each one is called here, and is plain about the three with no equivalent.
Operations
Running a timetabling office: migration, clashes, utilisation and workload.
- 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.
- What a timetable reveals about peopleA timetable is personal data about staff and students. What it discloses, which parts are more sensitive than they look, and the access controls worth insisting on before you publish it.
- Covering an absence without breaking the timetableFour ways to handle a lecturer who cannot teach, who has to be told, and why recording who covered whom matters more than the change itself.
- A glossary of timetabling termsThe same thing, four different words. Academic scheduling has no common vocabulary: a British timetabling officer and an American registrar describe the same afternoon in words that barely overlap, and a few of those words mean the opposite thing on the other side.
- The annual timetable cycleFrom rollover to publication. Americans call it the schedule build, the British call it the rollover, and Australians call it timetable development — it is the same nine months, and the software occupies a surprisingly small part of it.
- Exam invigilation and seatingWho is actually in the room. An exam timetable that says when and where is half an exam timetable; the other half is who is supervising, how many of them, and which desk each candidate sits at.
- Space utilisation surveysFrequency, occupancy, and the figure nobody likes. A survey almost always produces the same result, and it is almost never the one the institution expected: the rooms are busy and the seats are empty.
Connecting to your systems
Your student record system holds who the students are and what they are taking. A timetable decides when and where. These four are about the line between those two sentences, in the record names each system actually uses.
- Timetabling alongside SITSSITS holds who the students are and what they are taking. A timetable decides when and where. This page is about the line between those two sentences, in the record names your SITS team actually uses.
- Timetabling alongside BannerBanner builds the schedule around the section and the CRN. A timetabling system builds it around the room and the week. This page maps the two, field by field, in the form names your registrar’s office works in.
- Timetabling alongside Workday StudentWorkday splits the course into three objects where most systems have one, and the split is exactly where a timetabling boundary wants to be. This page is about that, in Workday’s own object names.
- Putting the timetable in your VLEStudents do not visit a timetabling system. They live in the VLE and in their calendar, and the timetable has to arrive there. This page is about the two mechanisms that do it, and about the plugin we do not publish.
- Timetabling alongside PeopleSoftCampus Solutions keeps the catalogue and the schedule in two layers and links them through the Associated Class. That link is the most useful thing on this page, because it is what tells you which sections have to be scheduled as a set.
- Timetabling alongside Ellucian ColleagueColleague is driven by four-letter form mnemonics, and people who work in it speak them. Nobody says “the sections form”; they say SECT. This page is written in those, because that is what the conversation will sound like.
- Timetabling alongside CallistaAustralian institutions separate enrolling in a unit from choosing which classes you attend. Almost every scheduling mistake made by someone who learned the trade in Britain comes from treating those as one step.
- Timetabling alongside UNIT-eFurther education is not a smaller university. It counts learners rather than students, it is funded on a return rather than on fees alone, and its timetable carries a register that money depends on. This page is about that difference.
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.
- Generating a timetable per studentA group is a convenient approximation, and where it stops being true is where complaints come from.
- Week numbers, and why the calendar's are the wrong onesA teaching week number is not the ISO calendar week. What week 1 means, why some institutions run into negative numbers, and what breaks when software computes the number instead of reading it.
- What a recurring room booking really isWhy one repeating booking can become several, what fortnightly and monthly patterns really mean, and why a clash check has to see more than the public timetable shows.
- Emailing weekly timetables to lecturersOne letter per lecturer, their own week attached, in their own language — written and scheduled by the school itself.
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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