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