Choosing
The school edition and the university edition
Wise Timetable ships as two products from one codebase. Most of the difference is the shape of a school day — and one of it is worth knowing before you let two people work in two different places.
Two products, one codebase
They are not a big version and a cut-down one. They are two answers to two different weeks.
A university week is built around a programme, its years and its branches, with sessions of any length starting at any time and student groups that split and merge per module. A school week is built around a class that moves through the day together, in periods of one school hour, with breaks that matter as much as the lessons.
Trying to serve both from one set of defaults produces something that is awkward for everybody, so we do not. The two editions install side by side under different names, keep their settings apart, and you choose one when you buy — the browser administration is the same in both.
What actually differs
The list is long; these are the ones a planner notices in the first week.
| School edition | University edition | |
|---|---|---|
| The day | A school hour occupies two lines of the grid, and only the first carries a time. The ladder is built in pairs. | Every line is its own slot with its own time. |
| Lesson length | Whole school hours. | Fractional and decimal durations, and a minutes view. |
| Branch | Not shown. One implicit branch per programme and year, created and maintained for you. | A first-class object you create, name and assign courses to. |
| Gaps in the day | Weighted heavily against. A gap in a class day is a complaint from a parent, so the generator is told not to spend any. | Tolerated. Students walk between lectures and a free hour is not a fault. |
| Generator effort | Roughly three times as many optimisation cycles, because one week has to be right. | Fewer cycles over many more weeks. |
| Second shift | Supported, including a lecturer who may only be asked for one shift a day. | Not offered. |
| Break handling | Break counts are reported after every run — how many short, how many long, per lecturer and per class. | Available, but not part of the run report. |
| Students | A group is a class, sized directly. | Unallocated-student counters and automatic group sizing from enrolment. |
The branch, and why it disappeared
This is the part worth reading twice.
A university branch — a named specialisation inside a year of a programme — has no counterpart in a school. So the school edition does not show one. Every screen that would ask you to pick a branch simply does not have the control.
It has not gone away underneath, though, because the timetable data is the same data in both editions. What the school edition does instead is keep exactly one branch per programme and year, created for you, named after the programme and the year, and repaired automatically whenever you import or open a file. Every course list, group list and student list resolves through it. You never see it and you never have to.
That arrangement is invisible and reliable right up until something puts a second branch under the same programme and year. The school edition resolves to the first one it finds, so everything hanging off the second — its groups, its courses, its students — stops appearing in that planner's lists. Nothing is deleted. It simply cannot be reached from that screen.
Which is why the browser needs one house rule
The web administration does not know which edition your school runs, and that is deliberate.
The browser application reads the timetable, not the product. It offers what the data supports: if a setting exists for your school it is on the screen, and if it does not it is not. Nothing in it is switched on or off by which desktop program you bought, and that is what lets one administration serve both editions and every school that installs no desktop at all.
The consequence is that the browser will let you create a branch, because for a university that is an ordinary thing to do. If your school runs the school edition of the desktop program, leave branches alone in the browser. One per programme and year already exists and is looked after for you; adding a second is the one edit that a school desktop cannot show you afterwards.
Two smaller ones worth knowing while both are in use. A course created in the browser arrives with no branch of its own, and a school desktop re-homes it — from its groups where it can, or into the only programme where there is only one. And a course that a university has put in several branches keeps all of them in a school edition, intact and written back intact, but shown and labelled under the first.
If nobody at your school uses a desktop program at all, none of this section applies to you and branches in the browser behave exactly as they read.
Choosing, if you are not sure which you are
Does a class move through the day together?
If the answer is yes for most of your teaching, you want the school edition, whatever the institution is called. If students choose combinations that no two of them choose identically, you want the university edition.
Is a lesson always one period?
Whole periods, taught in a fixed ladder, point at the school edition. Ninety-minute seminars, three-hour laboratories and four-hour clinical blocks point at the other.
Does a free hour in the middle of the day matter?
If a gap is something you will be asked about, the school edition's generator is already tuned for that and the university one is not.
Do you need branches, or only programmes and years?
Named specialisations inside a year need the university edition. If your structure stops at programme and year, the school edition removes a whole layer you would otherwise have to fill in.
Still not sure? Ask before you install.
Moving a school between editions is something we do, but it is easier not to need to. Tell us what your week looks like and we will say which one it is — and if the honest answer is the university edition for a school, we will say that too.
One school, one edition
Whichever you run, run one of it. The two editions read the same timetable and disagree about how to draw a day — the school edition's ladder is built in pairs of lines and the university edition's is not — so the same timetable opened in the other product does not look wrong, it looks like a different timetable.
The browser administration is the exception and the reason it is worth preferring: it is the same application for both and for neither, and a school that runs no desktop at all never meets any of this. The web administration and the desktop planner sets out what that arrangement looks like.
Related
- The web administration and the desktop plannerWhether you need a desktop program at all, and the one setting that decides which side owns your data.
- Moving from UntisThe other way this question comes up: Untis is built around the school week, and the structural difference is the same one.
- The manualsThe browser administration guide, and the planner manuals for both editions.
Want to see this working?
Book a 45-minute online presentation and we will walk through it against your institution's own scheduling problem.