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Messages - Richard

#1
Get Help / optional subject timetabling
April 25, 2008, 04:22:34 PM
First of all, thanks for the great program.

We've been experimenting with it at a Spanish university for the last few weeks and we've been very impressed with it's power and functionality.

Our question is about timetabling a period when students split up into optional subjects, of which they can take any one or none.

Is there an easy way to include this concept in the generated timetable without specifying which students go to which subject (which is a lot of extra work for little gain)?

We want to specify a room and the time and the teacher(s) but we don't need to include the student sets in this case.

In other words, these are activities that students CAN do but they are not obligatory.  

(For your information, our situation with a simplified example:

the university has centres; in this example the Faculty of Education

each centre organises degree studies; in this example a Degree in Social Education (DSE) and a Degree in Primary Education (DPE)

a degree contains different years; in this example DSE1, DSE2, DSE3 and DPE1, DPE2, DPE3

a degree contains obligatory subjects, some of which are obligatory in more than one degree; in this example Educational Psychology (EP) in the first year - so we have groups of students from different degrees that coincide in the same activity: the groups DSE1-A and DPE1-A do EP together in one set of activities and DSE1-B and DPE1-B do EP together in another set of activities

a degree also contains optional subjects, which are often optional for more than one degree; in this example Basic English and Basic French, which take place at the same time periods. This is what our question is about. Can we reserve teachers, rooms and times  and associate the same student groups, for example, DSE1-A to both activities as an either/or relation, without contradicting the timetable?

Thanks in advance,

Richard
#2
General Stuff / re-importing solved timetable
July 16, 2009, 11:54:24 AM
Good morning.

We are working with FET in Spain in a university context. This is the second year we have used this great (and improving) software to generate new timetables for two of our centres.

I want to ask if it is possible to re-import a solved timetable into FET for further manipulation, taking as a starting point to block all activities using the parameters of the solved timetable.

This would help us add some complementary activites in some of the remaining gaps, after the main timetable has been published, without resorting to external editing of published timetables.

This option, if it exists, should be automatic, because we have found that we never know till it's too late that we have got a basic timetable we want to run with. Once FET is closed, you can't get this information back, can you?

Many thanks!

Richard