Hello and question

[the_new_mr]

Hello,

First of all, congrats on an incredible feat of programming.  FET is very impressive.  My hat goes off to you!

I have a question regarding our use case.  I've had a quick look at FET and we are wondering if there's a way to configure and use it for our purposes.

• We run a number of courses in parallel.  Let's say 3 for this example.  And generally have 3 or 4 tutors available for teaching
• Mostly, a tutor will teach the same group of students in the same room all day every day for a number of weeks in a row.  Anything from 2 to 40 weeks
• A substitute tutor may be needed now and again to provide cover for annual leave, sick leave etc
• Sometimes a different tutor may come in for half a day to a full day once or twice a week for a course

These are generally the conditions.  We need a system to show who's teaching what, where, when and something to help manage substitute teacher cover etc.  We tried using a spreadsheet but, as you know, this got very complicated very quickly.

Is FET suitable for our needs?  If so, how should we go about configuring it.  I couldn't quite see how to do the above but maybe I'm not familiar enough with it.

Thanks in advance!

[Liviu Lalescu]

Hello,

Thank you for the appreciation!

I am not sure you can use FET, the official or a customization made for your case. A first and very useful thing for me would be an example, preferably as pdf. This would be so I can understand the situation better. If the file is private you could send it to me by email.

In the official FET each activity has specified an exact teacher (or more), a students set (or more), and subject. Since in your case you need FET to choose the teachers for activities, we might use something similar to the FET-AAT custom version, in which the FET hours of the day are real-life time slots and the FET days of the week are real-life teachers.

In FET there is a matrix of time slots. If you need a multi-week timetable, we could increase the number of days per week, but preferably the matrix should be as small as possible.

For substitution, FET is not too good. Volker developed a tool named TiTiTo, but it is not free and I am not sure it can be customized for your case. He can tell you more.

[the_new_mr]

WOW!  Thanks for the super quick reply!

I see what you mean.  We don't actually need FET to select teachers.  We do that.  It's more of a management thing.  It's not that we need FET to come up with the timetable itself.  We're looking for something to manage and see who's doing what, when and manage substitutions.  I hope I'm being clear enough?  I realise that FET's power is in being able to create the timetable itself and we woudn't be using its power.  So even though FET is clearly an amazing tool.  It probably isn't the tool for our job.

Thanks anyway for the response.  Very much appreciated!

[Liviu Lalescu]

  My pleasure!

Indeed, FET was built primarily to generate the timetable, and then we added the facility of exporting it in various formats and added the facility of locking/unlocking of the activities. I am sorry it is not useful for you.