First time user

[engineer]

Forgive my ignorance with this as I have just discovered this software today and begun to look at it.

I work in an engineering department at a further/higher education college. We have roughly 30 members of staff with various specialisms and teach several hundred students.

My question is whether we can make this software work for us, as we normally timetable by hand, at great mental expense! We deliver certain units that several members of staff could teach. For example, Analogue Electronics 1, there will be 4 members of staff that have the knowledge/experience to deliver this unit.

If I specify all the student pathways, including their groupings, with all the units that they need to be enrolled on as 'subjects', as well as the various units that lecturers are able to deliver as 'qualified subjects', will FET be able to automatically place lecturers on the units by determining who is available?

Or, do staff have to be attributed to 'subjects' manually?

We generally have 2 lecturers deliver each unit for simpler verification purposes but we may need a different number depending on student numbers or there may be room/staff clashes. This year we have had 1 member of staff teach around 90% of the more mathematical engineering units, as we had a shortage of staff and these were more difficult units to staff, than less mathematical units.

I hope this makes some sense.

A

[Liviu Lalescu]

Hello, A,

No problem about you being new to this software!

In the official FET, each activity has the subject, students, and teacher(s) specified by the user, and the program allocates activities to time and space.

If you need to allocate activities with (subject, students) to a teacher and a time and space, you might be able to use a custom version. Please have a look at the FET-BP custom version; if you could download it it might be better. You have some example files there and in the Help a menu for Help for the BP version, which you can read.

In FET-BP, you have the activities and allocate them to a matrix FET days = real life teachers and to FET hours = real life time slots (day, hour).

There are also some other custom versions, MAPR (but it is very ugly, bad, old, poor, etc.), AAP, and AAT. You might want to read about them in the dedicated posts about them. But BP is probably the best. If I remember correctly, AAT was superseded by BP. AAP allocates firstly activities to teachers, then in a second phase you use FET official on this data.

Please let me know.

[engineer]

Thank you, Liviu

I will investigate further and report back with the outcome.