The Book Bag : Scheduling

Tracking Changes in Student Schedules

Katie Infinger — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:18:00 GMT

It's the beginning of the school year, so you're probably dropping, withdrawing, and transferring lots of students from classes. You can easily track these schedule adjustments so you know what's going on around you.

You'll need to set up the Academic year dates to track changes. In Configuration, open the session in the academic year, and mark the Track schedule changes beginning on checkbox and enter a starting date, which will probably be a date after you've completed student schedules, otherwise your reports could get long. After the tracking start date arrives, a ninja in your database will record schedule changes.

If you want to see the changes, just run the Drop/Add Report and you'll have all the information you need.

Stop, Drop, Withdraw, or Transfer

Katie Infinger — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:20:00 GMT

Do you have students who want to switch sections of the same class or move from one course to another course? Which option will keep grades and attendance with the students' records? Let's take a look at the differences in dropping, withdrawing, and transferring students:

Drop deletes the student's enrollment in the class, deletes the student's grading and attendance information for the class, and omits the class from report cards and transcripts.
Withdraw retains a record of the student's enrollment in the class, retains the student's grading and attendance information for the class, and includes the class on report cards and transcripts.
Transfer moves a student between sections of the same course.

You can drop, withdraw, or transfer students using Edit Student Schedules. On the Scheduling page, click Edit student schedules and open the student.

To Drop or Withdraw the student — In the Class column, select the blank. You'll get a prompt saying you can drop or withdraw the student. Click Drop or Withdraw. If you receive the prompt the student will be dropped, check the withdrawal date on the term (BB145859).
To Transfer the student — In the Class column, select a new section. If you transfer a student to a new section within a term, only the new class ID and teacher name appear in the row for the course on report cards. If you transfer a student to a new section across terms (for example, Madelyn is in section 2 of Earth Science in Fall and section 5 of Earth Science in Spring) and print report cards for both terms, both class IDs and teacher names appear in the row for the course on report cards.

Knowledgebase solution BB134926 contains even more information and steps. Not sure of what happens when you drop, withdraw, or transfer a student? Review How to determine whether to withdraw, drop, or transfer a student, which has an awesome reference chart.

School's Out for Summer - What Do You Do?

Katie Infinger — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:50:00 GMT

Want to get a ahead on the 2009-2010 year? Take a moment to review this list. We’ll cover many of these in more detail down the road.

Take a good look at your Academic Year in Configuration. Ensure the correct marking column set is associated with your session, check the starting and ending dates on the terms, and enter your scheduling calendar so your attendance cycle days are correct for the whole year.
Ensure the first cycle day is correct on the academic year terms. If the starting cycle day is wrong, the cycle days in attendance will be off for the entire term.
Refresh yourself on drop, withdraw, and transfer (BB134926). Be sure to enter a withdraw date on the term so you can withdraw students from classes instead of dropping them.
Activate (BB386252) the new Academic Year and marking columns in Faculty Access for the Web. Your faculty can get started entering assignments.
Learn the Walk-In Scheduler (BB146715). Even if your students are scheduled, you may get some last-minute change requests or a few new students.

Do you have some other helpful tips that will help prepare for the new year? Leave a comment!

The Masters of the Scheduling Universe: Part 2 - Scheduling Students

Katie Infinger — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:31:00 GMT

Back at the Royal Palace Academy Registrar's Office, the master schedule is complete. Prince Adam is working on scheduling students based on the course requests entered online. The next step, according to the Scheduling Checklist, is to generate student schedules. Once again, Prince Adam shoves his desk chair aside, raises his sword aloft, and shouts, "By the power of Greyskull!" He-Man is ready to enroll students in classes.

It's a good thing He-Man uses Generate Student Schedules to automatically schedule students because Skeletor is up to his antics again. He clicks Scheduling to set up the Generate Student Schedule parameter. On the General 1 tab, he marks to save a copy of the scheduling scenario before and after processing and creates an output query of students with incomplete schedules. On the General 2 and Advanced tabs, he selects the restrictions to override and uses alternate course requests so that Generate Student Schedules will produce the best scheduling results. He filters on the Upper School so he can complete each school's schedule. After clicking Schedule Now, he know processing can take a while, so he leaves to defend Castle Greyskull.

After returning from battle, he realizes there are students with incomplete schedules, so he tweaks the Generate Student Schedule parameter and runs it again. On the General 2 tab, he marks the reschedule current enrollments checkbox, which changes scheduled enrollments to different sections in order to complete more student schedules. Once all the requests are filled, he can fill free periods with Study Hall or another course.

Just as student schedules complete, Man-E-Faces bursts in his office and wants to un-enroll from Shop class and take Ballet. He-Man sighs and opens Edit Student Schedules to adjust Man-E's courses. Saving Man-E's new schedule, he chuckles knowing he'll be changing more student schedules throughout the summer and at the beginning of next year.

The Masters of the Scheduling Universe

Katie Infinger — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:10:00 GMT

In the Royal Palace Academy Registrar's Office, Prince Adam is working on the schedule. He's already copied course restictions for next academic year, and students have entered their course requests online. The next step, according to the Scheduling Checklist, is to create classes and the master schedule. Prince Adam shoves his desk chair aside, raises his sword aloft, and shouts, "By the power of Grayskull!" He-Man is now ready to conquer scheduling.

If the Master Schedule doesn't change from year to year, He-Man can copy the master schedule to save time (and potentially Castle Grayskull). For each class, he can select to copy meetings, teachers, and rooms. This plan works only if the years being copied from and to have the same session defined, and for each session, the same timetable and terms selected.

In this episode, Royal Palace Academy changed their sessions and timetable for next year, so He-Man must create classes before he can schedule meeting times, rooms, and teachers. If the course restrictions are entered correctly, he can automatically create classes according to those restrictions. Before clicking Create Now in Create Classes, he ensures he has a valid backup and a saved copy of the scheduling scenario.

After creating classes, He-Man automatically schedules meeting times, teachers, and rooms using Generate Master Schedule.

Orko says:
Schedule in layers. Schedule the most important classes, such as senior classes and specialty classes, before scheduling remaining classes. You can manually schedule those classes and then run Generate Master Schedule. Don't mark the Clear checkboxes on the General 2 tab in the Generate Master Schedule parameter or your existing scheduled classes will be deleted. You can also run several rounds of the same Generate Master Schedule parameter to build the schedule by selecting each round's classes in the Filters tab.

Receiving exceptions? Don't worry, it's not Skeletor's attack, it's probably just a setting within your course, room, or teacher record that can be easily adjusted. Check out How to troubleshoot Generate Master Schedule exceptions for details on each exception.

You now have what it takes to defend Castle Grayskull and become the Master of the Scheduling Universe! In our next episode, He-Man conquers scheduling students.

Copying Course Restrictions

Katie Infinger — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:06:00 GMT

Course Restrictions define how a course is scheduled from year to year. Without course restrictions, Generate Master Schedule doesn't have a pattern or times restrictions to follow when scheduling classes. As you prepare for next academic year, copying course restrictions can save you hours of data entry time and maintain consistency from year to year.

From the main Courses page, you can copy course restrictions and grading information for multiple courses at the same time. Don't worry, if you only need to copy restrictions and grading information for a specific course record, you can copy within the course record; just select the Restrictions 2 or Grading tabs and you'll see Copy on the action bar.

Remember:

If restrictions for the selected academic year/session already exist on the course record, you'll receive the following error, "Restrictions for this Academic Year and Session already exist."
You can only copy years and sessions that use the same timetable. If your timetable is different, you'll receive the error, "Cannot copy restrictions between sessions with different timetables."
Sessions must have the same marking columns to copy grading information for a course from one session to another. If they do not have the same marking columns, grading information must be entered manually or copied from a different session which does have the same marking columns.

For step-by-step instructions on copying course information, refer to Knowledgebase solution BB148977.

Merlin the Wizard: Ready to Create Your Student Progression Entries

Nate Hall — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:34:00 GMT

Everyone knows the good wizard Merlin portrayed in the classic Disney movie The Sword in the Stone. He was a jovial little guy willing to help young Arthur claim his throne by protecting him from all manner of ills, from hawks to larger fish. Well, one ill that many of you may be experiencing this time of year is getting your students ready for scheduling next year, and probably the most important process is creating the student progression entries for each student. Sure, these can be entered in one at a time, or you could import them all at once. But those options take a lot of time and time is money.

Well, this is where Merlin comes in. Merlin has many different jobs in Blackbaud’s school software, but one of his more useful - even if it’s only used once or twice a year - is to create the student progression entries. To do this, Merlin takes the form of the Mark for Reenrollment Wizard and this particular spell, if you will, is located in a couple of different places: it’s on the Student page in Records, in the Tools menu from the Students page, and under Status Wizards on the Administration page in Registrar’s Office. Once you locate the wizard and open it up, you’ll quickly see that this is a pretty straight-forward process, but if you need instructions for harnessing Merlin’s vast powers I’d recommend checking out Knowledgebase solution BB184652. And just one other trick, you can save the instructions easily by clicking the link for the printer friendly version and then creating a bookmark in your web browser.

Hope you are all enjoying the new Book Bag blog so far! If you’ve got any suggestions for blog topics or question/comments about the posts then post back and tell me about it! In the meantime, it’s beautiful outside and Merlin wants to go hang out in the sun.

Increase Scheduling Efficiency

Katie Infinger — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:08:00 GMT

I'm actually excited about the NHL playoffs because the Chicago Blackhawks will be heading there for the first time since 2002! That made me think about the folks responsible for scheduling NHL playoff games. They're juggling last minute teams battling for playoff spots, arena event schedules, team traveling time, and promoting ticket sales. It's no wonder so many games are on school nights!

Your scheduling process is probably similar to the NHL, but consists of juggling teacher and classroom availability, ever-changing student course requests, and the bell schedule. Before you even begin scheduling for the 2009-2010 academic year, set your scheduling business rules to increase efficiency. If you have multiple schools, you can adjust the rules to meet the needs of each school and the changes won't be reflected on the previously scheduled schools.

To set scheduling business rules, click Business Rules on the Configuration page, and then select Scheduling.

In the Include the following statuses when scheduling box, unmark the checkbox for any status not assigned to current students (such as Applicant, Withdrawn, and Graduate). This will prevent the scheduling of non-current students who may have a progression entry for that academic year.
In the Consecutive meetings means less than [ ] minutes between field, define the maximum amount of time between consecutive meetings. The program uses this definition in the master schedule to determine whether a teacher has too many consecutive meetings in a day based on the number of maximum consecutive meetings entered on the faculty record.
In the Allow no more than [ ] {Periods or Classes} with non-homeroom teachers per day in a room field, you can specify the number of classes or periods with floating teachers to allow in the room per day. This prevents a regular teacher from having an incomplete schedule or getting bumped from the room to accommodate a floating teacher.
In the When creating a new class for a course restricted by pattern field, you can select Always create meetings automatically or Ask to create meetings automatically.
In the When adding a room or teacher to a meeting field, you can select Always reflect changes to other meetings automatically, Ask to reflect changes to all meetings automatically, or Do not reflect changes to other meetings. For example, selecting Always reflect changes to other meetings will prevent you from entering the same teacher in each meeting.
If you mark the Reflect class schedule changes checkbox, you can select in subsequent terms or in all terms from the drop-down list.
If you mark the Reflect student schedule changes checkbox, you can select in subsequent terms or in all terms from the drop-down list. This rule is similar to the reflect class schedule changes except it applies to students.
Mark the Generate request when enrolling in class without a request already present checkbox to create a course request if you enroll a student in a class the student did not request.
If you mark the Allow students to take a maximum of [ ] classes per term checkbox, you can enter a number. The program checks for this limit during automatic and manual scheduling.

Do you think the NHL has business rules that save them this much time? Perhaps!

Scheduling Resources

Katie Infinger — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

It's scheduling season for many of you, and preparation is key for a smooth scheduling process. We'll be posting lots of scheduling blogs with tips to help you out, but I wanted to share some of our great scheduling resources that are available for you any time:

The Scheduling Guide – This guide is the king when it comes to scheduling. It takes you through every part of the scheduling process beginning with the Scheduling page in The Education Edge and ending with printing student schedules.
The Scheduling Checklist – This handy-dandy checklist is always with you to make sure you don't skip a beat. You can access it from the Scheduling page by clicking Print Scheduling Checklist.
The Scheduling page – View the scheduling flow on the Scheduling page. Every task is grouped together so you can know what to complete before moving to the next step.
Forums – The forums are what friends are for. If you want to how other schools handle anything, just ask. There are lots of great people posting out there. Don't forget to share your own experiences with your colleagues!
Knowledgebase – Answers to your questions at any time. Just select your product, enter your question, such as "How to prepare for scheduling," and then click Search. Need extra help searching? View Knowledgebase Help.

Pssst.....In case you haven't heard, we're getting a new Knowledgebase! Stay up-to-date with the progress on our Web Sitings blog.
F1 – When you press F1 on your keyboard in the software, this extensive help file comes to the rescue.

Need more? We have awesome training offerings specifically geared around scheduling.

The eLearning Library
View online lessons that take you step-by-step through tasks at your own pace and whenever you need them. Try a few lessons by clicking Take a Tour under The Education Edge eLearning Library in the right navigation bar. If you like what you see, contact your account manager to subscribe to all lessons.
Distance Learning
Take the two-day instructor lead online training course, Scheduling for The Education Edge without leaving your school.
Charleston Training
Attend Blackbaud University in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina and take the carefully designed Scheduling for Registrar's Office 7 course.

I'll add more as I think of them. If you have any special tips that get you through Scheduling Season, add a comment!

Get the New Year off to a good start and set up Online Course Requests and Enrollments

Nate Hall — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:40:00 GMT

Happy New Year! I bet many of you have made New Year’s resolutions to be more efficient, and one of the biggest time-saving features for Education Edge users is the ability to let students request or even fully enroll in classes for the coming year. Through NetClassroom, schools can allow their students and parents to take a look at the classes which are available and then enter these requests. This could potentially save you dozens or even hundreds of man hours against sorting through stacks of paper course requests or wading through emails to find the courses each student wants to take, and then scheduling and entering each request.

Sounds like a spectacular feature, right? “Now how do I get started?” you ask. Believe it or not, something this time-saving is just as easy to setup. In Registrar’s Office, click Configuration, and then click NetClassroom. First things first: check out the Features section and make sure the Registration checkbox is marked for relations and/or students, depending on your school’s particular setup. Without this checkbox marked, any other setup is useless because the Online Course Request feature will not be available to NetClassroom users.

The next step is to go to the Registration Setup section and take a look at the display options and the scheduling exceptions that are checked when students enter requests/enrollments. Marking all of the exceptions can be helpful in keeping students fully informed about why they are not allowed to request a course and making sure the students know exactly which courses they will take when they are finished with the online registration process.

The biggest section in Registration Setup is where the meat of the setup process takes place. This area is where you determine which classes are available to register for each school, academic year, and session. The first screen after you click New contains the most basic setup options, such as what you want to enable for each school, session, and academic year combination. Only one setup is allowed for each combination, meaning that the students will either request courses or enroll directly into classes; you can’t have them do both.

At the bottom of the Setup screen, you can add a New Group. The groups added here allow you to group students and select the classes they can register for. For example, you may want to have one group for each grade level so the seniors are not seeing freshman English as an option, even though I’m sure seniors would love to be able to take freshman English again for credit (seriously, who wouldn’t want the easy A?). The bottom of the Group screen allows users to further group the classes to require the students to select from a group of courses. One option I can think of would be to have a row setup for each type of class. This would go something like this:

One row for the English requirement set up to say ‘Please select an English class’ and the row would include a selection of AP English, Honors English IV, or English IV
One row for the Quantitative Reasoning requirement set up to say ‘Please select a class from the following’ and the classes available would be AP Calculus AB, AP Calculus BC (FYI, one of my personal favorite classes when I was in high school), AP Statistics, Discrete Mathematics, Introduction to String Theory (for the over-achievers).
One row for the History requirement set up to say ‘Please select a History class’ and the available classes would be AP US History (another favorite), AP European History, Chinese History, Honors World History.
And so on and so forth, kind of like this:

Another possibility is setting up the registration to allow students to enter 6 requests but only set up 3 rows as above. The students would then be able to enter 3 more requests from any of the available courses as electives in a section that displays in NetClassroom as ‘Additional requests.’

Anyhoo, that is a brief rundown of setting up Online Course Requests (whew). For more information, I’d recommend checking out Knowledgebase solution BB262304. I’ll also check back periodically to answer any brief questions you may have, but you’ve got to post them as a reply to my post. Be sure to check back periodically for more from the Bookbag!

Scheduling Calendar...what? who? when? where? why?

Willow Schultz — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Happy New Year! Working with schools, I have found that a New Year brings different adventures. In high schools, Seniors have a full case of Senioritis, Juniors know they will soon be the head of the school, Sophomores are one step closer to graduating, and Freshman know they are only one semester away from picking on the new class of Frosh. As the snow days start and spring break looms on the horizon; it is a great time to start thinking about your scheduling calendar. "What?" you say…"scheduling calendar?" Let’s look at the what, who, when, where, and why on this crazy thing called the scheduling calendar (don’t forget to get out your magnifying glasses).

What: I think it is the most important aspect of the calendar and after all, I am the blogger. The scheduling calendar lists the dates when your school is in session with classes, when they are in session without classes, and when the students are out of session.

Who: With "what" out of the way, we can tackle the rest. It is a good idea to have your Registrar take a look at the scheduling calendar at the beginning of every semester and prior to any school holiday.

When: I've already covered that one with who; I’m a little tricky like that.

Where: The scheduling calendar is located in the session for every academic year. When you open the academic year in Configuration, open the session and select the Scheduling Calendar tab. Enter the dates that your school is not in session or is in an irregular session, such as a holiday break. If you would like to see the total academic year in calendar grid form, click the calendar icon to open a year calendar with important terms dates that are entered into the system.

Why: This is a big one! If term events are not entered into the system, your attendance will be affected. For example, if Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is not entered on the Scheduling Calendar and you have that day off; teachers will be able to enter attendance on this day.

If you have a rotating schedule, and your Monday classes are supposed to be shifted to Tuesday and all classes going forward are supposed to be shifted, the system will not know to do this unless the Martin Luther King, Jr. date is entered and "Skip?" is marked on the Scheduling Calendar tab. If "Skip?" is marked, this can affect attendance if you have Cycle Days named after the days of the week; before you know it, a Tuesday will be named Monday on your scheduling calendar.

For more information on this topic, check out:
How to select, readjust, or skip a specific cycle day: BB131632
Holiday calendar entry reflects school is in session: BB143889
How to define calendar events: BB131631

One last thing to leave you with: After future attendance has been entered, you can't update the scheduling calendar. This is because the attendance would have to be shifted to a different day, and the program won't know what attendance codes to enter for the future dates. In order to change the scheduling calendar for a day that attendance exists, the attendance from the day being changed and forward will have to be deleted and re-entered.

Good luck to all you crazy EE folks!

Scheduling Teachers, Meeting Times, and Rooms

Katie Infinger — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

There's a lot of scheduling going on out there, so it's a good thing you can do lots of scheduling in The Education Edge. After you create classes for next year, you can automatically or manually assign meeting times, teachers, and rooms. Let's take a look:

Generate Master Schedule (BB129710)
Use Generate Master Schedule for the majority of your scheduling. You can schedule teachers, rooms, and meeting times at once, and then manually tweak the classes if you need to.

On the Scheduling page, click Generate Master Schedule, and then click on the Action bar.
You can run Generate Master Schedule for all, selected, or one course. You can exclude periods using student schedule conflicts, include teachers and rooms in the process, and select the start terms to schedule.
On the General 2 tab, you can schedule teachers, rooms, and meeting times. You can select to schedule class meetings only if one of the following conditions applies:
- Room and teacher can be scheduled
- Room can be scheduled
- Teacher can be scheduled
- Room or teacher can be scheduled
On the Advanced tab, you can override restrictions and course rules and determine the Generate Master Schedule algorithm. For example, you can override the maximum number of consecutive meetings a teacher can teach, or you can instruct the program to give the highest priority to classes with a single teacher or room resource and the lowest priority to estimated class size.

If you receive an exception such as Teacher conflicts with course rule, review How to troubleshoot Generate Master Schedule exceptions (BB189272).

Edit Master Schedule (BB139597)

On the Scheduling page, click Open a class, or click Edit master schedule and select the class.
Select the Meetings tab to assign meeting times, teachers, and rooms.
To speed your search for free resources, select Class, Find Free from the menu bar. You can also use the Display availability for field to identify times during which teachers and rooms are scheduled so you do not mistakenly create conflicts when moving a class.

Time Saving Tips:

Review your course restrictions (BB358670): I know the heading says time saving tips, but trust me, Generate Master Schedule most likely won't schedule your Geology on Tuesdays unless you add those time or pattern restrictions.
Schedule in layers: Take advantage of the Filters tab in Generate Master Schedule to schedule groups of classes instead of all classes at once. For example, schedule your science classes, and then schedule your musics, and then your social studies.
Manually add the important classes first: If you need to make sure Honors Calculus is third period, manually schedule it before running Generate Master Schedule.
Give the Business to the Business Rules: Set business rules to speed manual scheduling (BB146886). For example, instruct the program to automatically reflect changes to other meetings when you assign a teacher or room to a meeting.

Changing the Start and End Times of Periods?

Katie Infinger — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:17:00 GMT

Scheduled times tend to change at the last minute. Some of the public high schools around here are starting later next year than this year. So I started thinking about how easy it is to update the start and end times of periods after scheduling classes in The Education Edge and thought I'd share it with you.

When you edit the times in a timetable, you are creating a copy of your existing timetable with the new period times. As always, be sure to create a backup (BB52243) before changing the timetable.

In Configuration, select Registrar Setup and then click Timetables.
Select the timetable to edit and click Open on the action bar.
On the Periods tab, edit the appropriate periods.
- If you have already scheduled classes, edit the start and end times of periods only. Do not change the order of periods in the day.
- To ensure you do not invalidate patterns or delete class meetings, edit each cycle day's periods manually. Do not use the synchronization feature.
Click Save on the action bar.
On the Update Setup Process screen, unmark the checkbox for any academic year to exclude from the changes.

After you save changes to the timetable, all the information for the academic year points to the copied versions (e.g., Monday-Friday1). So that's it! By the way, these steps are also in Knowledgebase (BB201338).