SCHEDULE25 and 25E are two new software packages CUNY has acquired to handle the time and energy-consuming task of scheduling space -- lecture halls, class rooms, and conference rooms -- for over 200,000 students on its campuses. The complementary application, 25E, can be used to assign space for one-time-only academic and non-academic events.
Baruch College was one of the first CUNY campuses to begin implementing these packages, using SCHEDULE25 to assign classroom space for this academic year, and according to Tom McCarthy, Baruch's Registrar, the results have been notably successful.
Interviewed recently in his office at Baruch, McCarthy ruefully recalled his pre-SCHEDULE25 days. He remembers that in a job he held at a college in West Virginia, each semester's scheduling was an elaborate game of logistics involving "a body who went through a pound of erasers and piles of papers," matching up lists of students, syllabi, faculty schedules and available spaces.
As McCarthy tells the story, no matter how carefully he proceeded, some courses would inevitably end up being booked into rooms too large or small or ill-equipped for their needs. Complaints came in and the erasing and rewriting started.
For more than ten years he had been hearing about SCHEDULE25 at professional conferences and was pleased when CUNY -- where he had come to work -- purchased a license in the spring of 1994. Baruch became among the first CUNY colleges to use SCHEDULE 25, with a Student Information Management System (SIMS) interface within a UNIX environment.
The goal was to schedule classes for the Spring 1995 semester, but certain start-up procedures were necessary. The first step was to inventory all available space in the college and create files with detailed information about each room in the several buildings that comprise Baruch's large inner-city campus. A list of over 50 characteristics was complied, including specifications for handicapped access, types of blackboards, air-conditioning, audio visual fixtures and the number of windows.
The second step, undertaken by Joe Mui, a programmer in Baruch's Computing and Technology Center assigned to the project, was to implement a front end for SCHEDULE25 developed by Queens College. It permitted various files of Baruch information -- room descriptions, departmental requirements and so on -- to be entered and stored on a local platform and then submitted via CUNYNet to the central SCHEDULE25 computer at CUNY/CIS.
A test run done in December revealed a predictable handful of challenges to overcome. Certain classes couldn't be booked because they required physical features that had not yet been included in the database: history classes requiring map-hangers, for example, or rooms needing special electrical configurations for computers. (These characteristics were added to the list of characteristics for subsequent runs.) In some cases the right rooms were not available at the right time; in others, faculty and students had to rush between far-flung points of Baruch's campus to get to classes which had been booked back to back. In these cases, time and space codes were adjusted, and a second run in January succeeded in booking everything without a hitch.
Not only did SCHEDULE25 perform a major organizational task; it also produced information that gave Baruch administrators an idea as to how space could be booked more efficiently. The program produces matrix reports in the form of graphs which plot the hours in which spaces are in use. A concentration of classes taught by different departments within the same narrow time frame every day can mean that space will be hard to find and that elevators in classroom buildings will routinely be jammed, preventing classes from beginning on time. The reports permit administrators to encourage faculty to diversify the teaching hours within their departments, with benefits to students and teachers alike.
Using the supplementary program 25E, Baruch is also able to schedule, week by week and even day by day, space for such one time-events as makeup exams, faculty meetings, student activities and athletic events. In each case, one need only enter the pertinent times, dates and room requirements for the results to come back within seconds and the reservation to be confirmed.
Both McCarthy and Mui point to particularly difficult scheduling situations now made easy, as in the case of courses which fall under different disciplinary categories in the catalogue or which meet both as lectures and as small groups. And both agree that SCHEDULE25 and 25E have resulted major saving for the university, in time and money -- and, not least of all, in erasers.
--Holland Cotter