The Adelphi College Class Scheduling System

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

Technology is the making, modification, usage, and knowledge of tools,

machines, techniques, crafts, systems, and methods of organization, in order

to solve a problem, improve a pre-existing solution to a problem, achieve a goal,

handle an applied input or output relation or perform a specific function. It can

also refer to the collection of such tools, including machinery, modifications,

arrangements and procedures (Williams, 2012).

One of the remarkable and much known products of technology

advancement is the conversion of manually-operated system into automated

system. Automation produces a great impact in the lives of man, particularly in

the field of industry, business, medicine, and education (Williams, 2012).

A scheduling system is usually a form of software that allows someone to

construct schedules in an easier, faster and error minimized way. It is very

time consuming and sometimes leads to a disaster if output is not efficient.

The Adelphi College (TAC) as an educational institution offers services to

the clientele more particularly the students and to the community. The primary

operations of the school are non-stop starting from pre-enrolment up to the

post-graduation activities. These activities require money, labor force and time.
 It is a fact that arranging class schedules, instructor’s load and room

utilization for the students and faculty in every department is one of the many

activities that each department heads must prepare before classes start. But

the school used the manual way of preparing the class schedule. With the

manual system, more time and labor force is required to plot, arrange, and

revise the class schedules, room utilization and instructors’ load provided by

the department heads.

This process is a very large, complex, and time consuming task with

many inputs to take into consideration. The quality of the output has a

immense impact on students, faculty, and the department as a whole. Poorly

planned offerings pose a great impact on students’ ability to take courses, class

utilization, and students’ ability to fulfill prerequisites, time to graduation,

budget, and more. Poorly assigned faculty has a big impact to the quality of

instruction, the satisfaction of faculty members, student retention, and

department policies. Poorly scheduled timetable can also affect students’ ability

to take courses due to conflict, course utilization, lab utilization, and time to

graduation, student satisfaction, faculty satisfaction, department policies, and

it can lead to undesirable last minute changes. This study is proposed with the

aforementioned reasons as stated.

Faculty Loading is the distribution of workloads among faculty member

which is a task that requires planning. The preparation of class schedules and

faculty loading are done by every department manually which are subjected to

human errors.
 TAC students are thus affected by the changes in schedules of classes.

Such changes result to the delay of classes. Given that scenario, the

proponents believed that the proposed computerization of faculty loading is

helpful to the school as well as to the students and instructors.

This process partially defines the lives of students and faculty members

in terms of schedule and should not be taken lightly. Because of the impact of

this process, it is important to incorporate individual and group preference into

as many areas of this process as possible and to create a robust process that

generates close to optimal solutions.

There has been a research around course assignment and course

timetabling and many operations research techniques have been utilized to

address these problems, however often the techniques are tested, but rarely

implemented as shown by Carterand Lamporte (1998). While some solutions

have been fully implemented and there are a couple products available in the

market, those weren’t thoroughly investigated due to the software and

implementation cost associated with them. Since much of the research focuses

only on generating a feasible schedule and appears to lack the preference

drivers that are valuable in creating a highly desirable schedule I felt there was

room for further research in this area. We have taken into consideration 3

types of preferences in this research: faculty preference to teach a course,

faculty preference for teaching time of day, and student/general department

preference for each timeslot. Additionally, this approach is unique because it

piece of the puzzle.

With these problems, the researchers had come up to an idea of creating

an computerized class scheduling system of TAC in a web based form using

HTML, MySQL database PHP programming language. Through this

advancement, it is hoped that errors in operations be minimized and time and

manpower be conserved.
Figure1.1

Conceptual Paradigm of the Proposed System

INPUT PROCESS OUTPUT

Username and Identifying . Class Scheduling

Room Viewing all subject

key in their username

and password to

access the system

Figure 1.1illustrate the conceptual paradigm of the proposed system

which serve as a basis for requirements specification and analysis of the

existing system for a more responsive and efficient way of building a system.

The system requires users to login first. The system has two power users, the

administrator and the registrar. The admin controls the accounts of the

registrar and the registrar is the one who enters schedules. The system

processes time as specified in a certain subject determining its conflict.

This study aims to design a The Adelphi College Class Scheduling

System.

Specifically, this study aims to answer the following questions:

1. What is the existing procedure in the current Class Scheduling System of

TAC?

2. What are the problems encountered in the existing Class Scheduling System

of TAC?

3. What are the factors that affect the performance of the Class Scheduling

System of TAC in terms of:

a. Speed

b. Accuracy

c. Security

d. Data Handling

Objectives of the Study

This proposed system is pursued in order to fulfill the following specific

objectives:

1. To identify the existing procedure in the current Class Scheduling

System of TAC;
2. To identify the problems encountered in the existing class scheduling

system of TAC and the solutions that will be provided to address these

problems; and

3. To identify the factors that affects the performance of the TAC Class

Scheduling system in terms of:

a. Speed

b. Accuracy

c. Security

d. Data Handling

Importance of the Study

The implementation of the proposed computerized class scheduling

system would be beneficial for the entire TAC community, from Planning and

Extension Office to the Registrars’ Office and to all Faculty members and

Students.

Effective class scheduling is critical to the academic mission of the

School. It enables students to take the classes they need in a timely manner

and contributes to on-going cost containment efforts through efficient space

utilization and good stewardship of our valuable institutional resources.

Throughout the year, general purpose classrooms are used for both

classes and other key academic events, such as thesis defenses, faculty

candidate job talks or department meetings. Both types of classroom uses are
important to the academic mission of each unit and the College, and this policy

aims to ensure adequate space for both.

For most departments, class scheduling occurs several months prior to

the start of the term. Class scheduling requires significant advanced planning

and coordination, not only within each department, but also often with other

units to ensure that classes are sequenced appropriately to meet

interdisciplinary program needs.

The Class Scheduling System of TAC is broad in terms of areas being

covered. The study to be conducted would limit its scope to the following:

1. Administrator Module. This module handles the accounts of

registrar personnel & encoder.

2. Registrar Module. This module handles the system scheduling

inputs. Detection of conflicts as well as printing of reports is processed.

3. Encoder Module. This module handles the system input of names of

new student and new faculty.

The database of the proposed computerized class scheduling system

covers the records of a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration &

Bachelor of Secondary Education majors in Mathematics and English &

Bachelor of Elementary Education subjects only.

The reports module of this proposed computerized class scheduling

system would generate the overall schedule of the BSBA, BSED, BEED

schedule by year and semester, and individual subject schedule.

The following terms below provides for an operational definition that

would aid the reader with a greater understanding on this study.

Class Schedule. It refers to a specific time, room, instructor and subject of a

certain class.

Database Management System. It is a software system that manages the

storage and access to data in the database.

Information. It denotes data which is converted into a meaningful and useful

context for specific users.

Instructor's Workload. It signifies the instructor's information and workload

with in semester.

Students schedule. It shows the student's schedule from first year up to

fourth year within the semester.

User. It refers to a person who interacts with the system having their own

account and privileges.

By:

Emilie Ann Sumallo