Running the term
Covering an absence without breaking the timetable
It happens somewhere in every institution every week, it is handled by hand almost everywhere, and the expensive part is not the change — it is that six months later nobody can say who taught it.
Four options, and they are not interchangeable
A lecturer cannot teach on Thursday. There are four honest responses and choosing between them is a decision about whose time is being spent, which is why it should not be made by whoever happens to be at the screen.
Who pays, in each case
| Response | Who pays for it | When it is right |
|---|---|---|
| Cancel | The students, in contact hours. | Rarely the right answer on its own, and it should never be the default just because it is the easiest thing to enter. |
| Move it | Everybody's week, including rooms. | Good when the cohort is small and the change is far enough ahead that people can re-plan. |
| Substitute | A colleague. | The usual answer, and the one that most needs recording. Somebody has taken on work. |
| Teach it online | Nobody's timetable, and it is often the least disruptive. | Where the session survives the format. A link on the event itself rather than a mail nobody can find again. How that works. |
The bit that is usually missing: who covered whom
Most systems let you change the lecturer on a session. That is not the same as recording a substitution, and the difference shows up months later.
Overwrite the name and the timetable now says the cover lecturer teaches that module. The original fact — that Dr A was scheduled and Dr B covered on these four dates — is gone, and with it the answer to every question anybody asks afterwards: how much cover did this department absorb this term, is anyone doing an unreasonable amount of it, who do we pay for it, and who actually taught the session a student is now querying.
A substitution is an event, not an edit. It has a date, a person taken out, a person put in, and somebody who decided it — and a system that treats it as an edit has thrown three of those four away.
And it has to be reversible
Cover arrangements change back. The absence is shorter than expected, the colleague who agreed on Monday cannot do Thursday after all, somebody entered it against the wrong week.
If undoing a substitution means remembering what was there before and typing it back in, it will be done wrong eventually — and the version that gets published will be the wrong one. Treating the substitution as a record rather than an overwrite is what makes reversing it a single decision instead of an act of memory.
Who has to be told, and in what order
- The students in the affected groups, and only them. An institution-wide announcement about one seminar teaches people to ignore announcements.
- The cover lecturer, with the room, the time and what is being taught — not just a name in a cell they are expected to notice.
- Anything showing the timetable: the portal, the apps, the screens in the foyer, the calendar feeds people subscribed to. This is the argument for publishing from one source rather than sending a timetable out as a file — a change made once should reach everything. Four ways to publish, and who each is for.
- Whoever keeps the workload figures, which is usually a department administrator who currently finds out by accident.
The room is not automatically fine
A substitution changes who teaches, and people assume the rest is unaffected. Two things often are. Equipment: a colleague covering a practical may need the same lab, and the lab may not be free. Permission: institutions that restrict which rooms a given member of staff may use will find the substitute is not on the list for that room.
Neither is a reason to refuse the substitution. Both are reasons for the screen to say so at the moment it is entered rather than for somebody to discover it at nine o'clock on Thursday.
Where this lives in Wise Timetable
Substitutions are entered against the session rather than by editing the lecturer, so the timetable keeps both facts — whose module it is, and who taught it on the day. Substitution management covers the screen; change notifications cover who finds out; and because everything publishes from one document, the portal, the apps, the signage and the calendar subscriptions all move together rather than one at a time.
Want to see this working?
Book a 45-minute online presentation and we will walk through it against your institution's own scheduling problem.