Rotating teachers and scheduling

[jasonm]

I'm scheduling a set of classes that will have a group of teachers (i.e. they are all science teachers and will teach lectures, seminars, labs in their specialty). Each teacher will teach during rotating weeks during the semester. There will be up to four of the same courses running simultaneously. How would you suggest I go about setting this up?

Thanks very much for any advice!

Best,
Jason

[Liviu Lalescu]

In FET you can schedule the timetable for a whole week, not for a whole semester. But maybe you can use some tricks to solve your problem.

For instance, add all the teachers and all the students to a big activity of the week. The rotation of the teachers will be a convention. If you need to book more rooms than a single one, you'll add dummy activities with the same starting time of these big ones.

I am sorry, but I do not have experience with rotating blocks. But if you write more, maybe we'll solve it.

[Volker Dirr]

Like Liviu already said:

If you don't have room problems, i recommend to place them all in a single activity. that will be the fastest variant (entering the data and generating).
The only disadvantage is, that the timetable maybe doesn't look so fine. But that is only a very minor problem.

If only a few activities have got a room problem, then you can also use Livius hint with "big activity" with dummy activities to care about rooms.

But if all activities (might) have room problems, then you maybe shouldn't do it that way (even it is possible).
In that case it is (maybe) better to add "normal" activities (not a big one) and use "same starting time" constraints.
The advantage is, that the timetables look smarter then.

[jasonm]

Thanks very much for the advice! Much appreciated!