Optimizing a Law School’s Course Schedule

[Excerpt] “Just like other educational institutions, law schools must schedule courses by taking into consideration student needs, faculty resources, and logistical support such as classroom size and equipment needs. Course scheduling is an administrative function, typically handled by an Assistant Dean or an Associate Dean, who works with the faculty and the registrar to balance these considerations in advance of the registration process. Usually, the entire academic year is scheduled in advance, although the spring semester may be labeled tentative until registration begins for that semester. It’s hard to imagine, but some schools even publish a two-year schedule of upper-division courses so that students can plan their entire law school career in advance. In order to give assistance to those academics involved for the first time in the scheduling process, this article discusses the law school scheduling process and how a scheduling software package has worked to successfully automate what has been seen as one of the most abysmal administrative tasks of an Associate Dean. We first provide a background to course scheduling at a typical law school. We then present a review of the tools for, and literature on, course scheduling, followed by a discussion of how technology can be applied to course scheduling in general, and our outcomes of applying this technology in a law school environment. We close with a brief summary.

Operational Research in Education

Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors. Another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions, how to measure it, and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings. Local governments, as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation, may also need to make decisions regarding, for example, the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones, as well as the day-to-day logistics of getting pupils to schools. Issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets, scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses. This survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government, managers and consumers of education, and the OR techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions

Joint Labor-Management Training Programs for Healthcare Worker Advancement and Retention

[Excerpt] Filling vacancies and retaining workers in shortage areas such as nursing and other allied health occupations remains a challenge in today’s healthcare industry. At the same time, low-wage workers in the healthcare industry often lack the educational credentials necessary to move into higher-paying occupations. This study seeks to understand the role of multi-employer joint labor-management healthcare worker training in meeting the needs of employers for career ladder advancement in their incumbent workforce. The study focuses on hospital employers and their experience with strategies for the advancement of low-wage and entry level workers into healthcare career pathways

A Set Union Based Formulation for Course Scheduling and Timetabling

The Course Timetabling Problem is a widely studied optimization problem where a number of sections are scheduled in concert with the assignment of students to sections in order to maximize the desirability of the resulting schedule for all stakeholders. This problem is commonly solved as a linear program with variables for each student or group of students with identical schedules. In this paper we explore an alternative formulation that aggregates binary student variables into integer variables denoting the number of students enrolled in a course. Our solution method assumes decomposition of the general schedule into time blocks, and applies a unique set theory based, integer linear programming formulation that seeks to maximize the total number of students enrolled in their desired sections across the time blocks. Once the problem has been solved, the simpler problem of disaggregating the solution is resolved. This approach can be used to find exact solutions, given sufficient computing power, or simplified to quickly find solutions within calculable bounds of optimality. Case studies with a local elementary school and a local high school show that the new formulation is significantly faster and can be made to be reasonably accurate

Out of the Debate and Into the Schools

Explores how practices and strategies at pilot and charter schools with autonomy in governance, budget, staffing, professional development, scheduling, and curriculum and instruction lead to different outcomes from those at traditional public schools