Untis, module by module

The one difference that matters

A school timetable is built around a class — a fixed group of pupils who move through the week together. A university timetable is built around a programme, its years and its branches, with student groups that split and merge per module and students who choose options that no two of them choose identically.

Everything else on this page is a name. That one is a structure, and it is what decides whether a system fits a faculty. Wise Timetable holds programme, year, branch, group and subgroup as first-class objects, and it can generate a timetable per student rather than per class.

The two school modules, and what answers them here

Neither exists here under that name. Both are done, and it is worth saying exactly how.

Pausenaufsichten. There is no module called break supervision, and there is a great deal about breaks. Before generation, a break can be made mandatory for a group after so many teaching hours and, separately and with its own figure, for a lecturer; a block of teaching can equally be set to run with no break inside it at all. After generation, Level pauses redistributes what is left, and optimising for lecturers and optimising for groups are separate commands, because the two pull against each other and the school has to decide which it is buying.

And it is measurable rather than a matter of impression. The pauses report — Ctrl+B — counts group gaps, lecturer gaps, and how many of the lecturer ones are long rather than short, so “we fixed the gaps” becomes two numbers you can compare between one run and the next.

The duty roster itself — who stands in the corridor at ten past eleven — is scheduled the way every other non-teaching duty is: as a booking of a type your school names and colours for itself, assigned to a member of staff, repeating across the weeks you choose, and visible in that person's own timetable beside their teaching. Substitutions and cover is how it is reassigned when somebody is away.

Sprechtage. The same mechanism, and it is the one our schools actually use. Name a booking type for the day, give it its own colour, place the slots, and they appear in the published timetable and on the foyer screens like anything else. Requests and approvals run through the ordinary booking workflow, and whoever asked is told by e-mail what was decided. What there is not is a parent-facing sign-up screen: the slots are published, and who takes which one is arranged the way your school already arranges it.

Both of these are school requirements rather than university ones, so if either is central to your institution it is worth a conversation before a shortlist rather than after.