Assigning a lesson group automatically

You can also assign several lesson groups to one lesson and let optimisation decide

a)        which of the lesson groups concerned is more suitable and

b)        which lessons can be scheduled simultaneously without a clash.

This means that you only need to tell the system which lesson should be scheduled every two weeks and it does not matter whether week A or week B comes first and which lessons alternate every fortnight. The system should make the ideal decision.

Please follow the procedure described below:

A number of lessons are held in a fortnightly cycle at the school - e.g. the subjects GS and BE. Basically it does not matter in wich week which lesson takes place.

Create two lesson groups, one for week A and the other for week B. Please refer to chapter 'Creating lesson groups' for more details on how to do this.

Now enter both lesson groups (short names) in the 'Les. groups' column, separated by a comma, for the lessons that are to take place every fortnight.

Timetable optimisation will now assign the lesson groups and decide which lessons can be scheduled simultaneously.

After timetable optimisation the results could be as follows:

For some lessons lesson group 'WA' (week A) has been selected and for others 'WB'. The 'Assigned lesson group' column shows which of the lesson groups in question has been selected for the lesson.

You can see in the timetable that, as a rule, the lessons alternate on a fortnightly basis. If optimisation does not find a suitable lesson for the alternate week the lessons are scheduled outside the core timetable so that one group of students finishes school earlier on the relevant day (in our example on Wednesday).

Tip: Displaying week A and week B in the same timetable

In order to display the lessons from 2 different weeks in one timetable as shown in the figure above, set the time range of the timetable to the whole school year and in the settings of the timetable activate the option 'Separate periods in case of clash' on the 'Layout 2' tab.