Dear all,
Just to make sure everyone knows what is happening with the timetable this
year.
Most of the university has switched to a centralized timetable system rather
than each department working out its own timetable as in previous years. In
theory this should in the long term make things easier and more efficient.
In practice it is making things chaotic in the short-term.
The Unitime timetable has been through multiple iterations over the
spring/summer and Jari Heikkinen has done an excellent job with the
Herculean task of trying to get corrections made each time.
The final version of the timetable was "fixed" just over a week ago.
Our timetable has gone from a situation in previous years where we ensured
no timetable clashes for compulsory/recommended optional courses done in the
suggested year to a timetable which after multiple pages of corrections from
Jari over the Spring/Summer still has more than 50 timetable clashes for our
students in the Autumn term.
A decision by the Education Council means that we are not able to correct
these directly, but rather all corrections have to go through a central
point. Each correction has to be justified and changes due to staff wanting
to rearrange things (rather than timetable clashes or omissions etc) have to
be approved by the Dean of Education. This includes changes due to staff
being off sick.
We are aiming to make corrections month by month, so that timetables for
September can be issued as soon as possible, rather than waiting for the
whole term to be sorted out.
We do not want to issue a timetable which requires more than 50 corrections,
especially since making one correction may require multiple other timetable
slots to change (especially in order to coordinate with other departments).
Jari has sent provisional September timetables to all staff teaching that
month and has sent starting dates/rooms to students for each course that
will start in September. He will let staff and students know when
registration for courses is possible.
It is chaos, but we are doing everything we can as fast as we can to fix the
timetable. The centralized service has our suggested changes for September -
to remove clashes and to correct other omissions/duplications by Unitime. I
hope these will be approved next week so we can issue timetables for
September next week, but it is out of our hands. My guess is that we will
not have timetables for December until October.
Please be patient.
Best wishes,
Lloyd