Schedule Automator

Scheduling instructors into classes for an academic term presents various challenges for a department chair and or other personel handling this task. The range of instructor ability, seniority or tenure status, personal and preferred availability, department course needs and likelihood of student course enrollment are considerations that a scheduler must take into account when deciding which courses are to be made available and which instructors will teach these courses. Currently, California State University, Northridge's(CSUN) department of Computer Science lacks an efficient system of course scheduling. These schedules are manually created by the department chair, with assistance from their department managers. The current process requires the distribution and collection of paper forms where instructors can indicate the courses they desire to teach and the times they are available to teach.

The scheduler then must process this data and input it manually into various spreadsheets and the scheduler proceeds to manually decipher oordinate, resolve and finally generate an academic term schedules.The primary issue with the current method is time-inefficiency as a result of the burdensome process of collecting and processing the data needed to generate schedules via paper forms and spreadsheets. The dependency of multiple spreadsheets can be time consuming and error-prone. The creation of software that provides a digital platform on which to collect data creates a starting point from which to digitize and someday automate the process though one must also consider the constraints placed by the university and by the individual staff members.

This project would create this starting point and employ the technology stack used by CSUN in order to allow future development groups to continue the progress started here and some day achieve an efficient scheduling system for department chairs and their assistants when creating course schedules each academic term.