Comments on: Must Scheduling be Sisyphean?

By: Maura Smale

Maura Smale — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 03:13:58 +0000

Thanks for your comments, Candice and Anne Marie. It’s nice to hear that we’re all doing pretty much the same thing re: scheduling. I always think that there must be some way to use technology to ease the pain, but I agree that there are so many variables that it’s hard to envision a system that could take them all into account.

By: Anne Marie

Anne Marie — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 01:06:57 +0000

I’m glad to see some discussion about this. I consider scheduling at my institution mostly Herculean and a little Sisyphean! We have 5 librarians teaching over 500 class sessions per year, about 75% of which are in the Core Curriculum.

Prior to each semester, two of us plot out a draft schedule and the Core liaison distributes dates to faculty. Because of technology limitations necessitating classroom swaps, it works better for us to give Core faculty dates rather than take requests. We work one-shot requests around the Core.

Librarians meet 3-4 times per semester to ‘claim’ Core sessions, and we work hard to keep the number and times as fair as possible. Each arranges & teaches one-shots with his/her own departments.

This all works fairly well, but is very labor-intensive. If we had all the computer classrooms we needed it would go faster, but it’s still a lot of variables to arrange.

By: Candice

Candice — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:23:44 +0000

Actually, I do think scheduling must be Sisyphean. =) A few years ago we tried going to an automatic scheduling system and it was a disaster- we just have too many variables to consider. Once you resign yourself to the fact that scheduling is demanding, it’s best to just carve out the necessary time to do it right.

Our system: faculty fill out an online request form. I check the request against our Outlook calendar and either approve it or suggest an alternate date. Once the date has been settled, I forward the form on to our amazing office assistant, who puts it into the calendar. Once a week, the instruction team meets and divides up the following week’s sessions. The office assistant then sends Outlook appointments to the assigned librarians, who then confirm details with the faculty of their sessions. We have 5 instruction librarians and teach approximately 400 sessions each academic year.

The weeks right before and right after the start of each semester are crazy, but I know it will be that way and plan my schedule accordingly. My office assistant also knows to block out time to work on the calendar.