Community College Faculty Scheduling

This web application has been constructed to provide centralized management of faculty preferences and eligibility information.  This data is critical to the staffing process for each term.  Rather than manually mapping out thousands of courses against thousands of possible instructors, this application facilitates the processing of assigning faculty to courses. By providing preferred teaching times and locations, the staffing users can make informed decisions about how best to staff their courses.

Faculty are appointed to departments with a ranking based upon seniority level. The actual assignment process uses randomization within each seniority level along with the evaluation of preferences to help department heads to schedule faculty to courses. Following the staffing of courses, faculty can enter the application and refuse or accept their assignments. The information processed is intense and the labor saved is very significant. 

By centralizing and standardizing the information required by all departments, we have been able to improve and streamline their process.  System calendars control access to features that fall within published dates.  The addition of structure and randomization to the staffing process has improved the fairness and communication between everyone involved.

The application has various control parameter screens.  These screens provide the ability to lock down features, adjust system tables driven by administrative rules and control many aspects of the overall processes.  Extensive reporting allows users at every level to gain a clear understanding of how the procedures are progressing and the ability to perform research.

The desktop application tools used were Visual Basic 6.0. The web based application uses a website powered by Windows 2000 Server, IIS, ASP and SQL/Server 2000. Various support applications were written that run unattended which perform error checking, synchronization and summary reporting features.