Online Class Scheduling and Faculty Loading System within a Decision Support Framework

Abstract

Developing course schedules to accommodate student enrollment needs has been a recurring and complicated task of the department heads each school term. To develop a course schedule connotes an assignment of time intervals for each course offering and optimization of available resources such as classrooms and computer laboratories and subsequently maximize the department faculty inventory and preferences. The study aimed to create a class scheduling and loading system which tackles academic department heads' responsibilities of establishing well-defined faculty teaching loads. A descriptive-developmental design was utilized using a researcher-made questionnaire and interview. The scheduling and loading system is articulated to allow the defining of teaching assignments to the time slot system by applying knowledge-based approach, appropriate heuristic functions and rule sets to load correct courses to faculty; and allow a search for the best slot on multiple viable slots within the decision-support framework.  Decision support framework facilitates administrative priorities to resolve conflicts on slots representing deviations from the assignment criteria. The result of the study indicated the reduction of time required for course scheduling and the results are more acceptable to faculty loads for the teachers. The study recommends embedding other parameters into the system and continuous improvement and maintenance should be done for the system, adding new constraints and requirements.