Hi, please forgive me if this post is miscategorized. I currently have the unenviable task of assigning part-time instructors to available courses. Usually this is done in a room with a paper spreadsheet and a lot of back and forth talk that takes into account teaching preferences, ability, seniority, etc. and is quite involved. Full-time faculty are assigned by someone else, and the spreadsheet is sorta synchronized by a member of our office staff, a process involving lots of email, etc. It all feels so 18th century.
So I posted on google answers asking if there was a good php web application for modifying databases that might help with this, and someone suggested Moodle.
I'm already using Moodle. Is this sort of bureaucratic scheduling and remote database administration something Moodle is good at that I haven't discovered yet, or did the poster misunderstand my initial question? (my guess.)
Thanks for any insights.
There's no explicit tool as such for this, but you could use (perhaps): a course that all the staff have access to; with a Wiki as your whiteboard that everyone or some people can edit; Choice activities for votes/polls; Forums for discussions, with perhaps some clever choice of Scale for peer rating/evaluation ...
What would be your ideal tool? Can you imagine/design an interface?
What would be your ideal tool? Can you imagine/design an interface?
I think my ideal interface for this would be a really simplified version of phpmyadmin that let committee members edit a simple online database, with a big button that said "export to delimited text". Wiki has too many opportunities for data garbling and wouldn't allow for searching by fields such as "room number" or courses. I suppose that within the context of Moodle, creating a bunch of courses through importing a flat file, and then providing an interface for editing the attributes of those courses easily would probably work. But really I probably need some sort of custom standalone timetabling app. Ugh.
There is a script for doing some timetabling with moodle. It isn't quite finished, but does work ... (for me, but then I made it).
The script assumes that you have assigned teachers and students to courses and that these are imported in moodle. The timetabler will then let you assign courses to available slots in rooms. This is probably only a solution for the last part of your problem (assigning courses to rooms).
The script assumes that you have assigned teachers and students to courses and that these are imported in moodle. The timetabler will then let you assign courses to available slots in rooms. This is probably only a solution for the last part of your problem (assigning courses to rooms).
I would have thought you'd need more than that (to handle all the negotiation etc) but have you thought about an Excel or OpenOffice spreadsheet in a shared network location somewhere?
The approach by Moodle where students and teachers manage their own enrollments seems to work very well. We use a dedicated application package called FirstClass by HumanEdge to do the timetabling but like others, am curious how I could exploit the csv data generated (course codes, names, descriptions and teacher codes) to automate the generation of Moodle courses. 
A concern that I have is that teachers may abandon crafting and recycling their moodle classes if they are regularly overwritten. On the other hand, they may throw up their hands in frustration when they keep inheriting a legacy of clutter from past courses taught by previous teachers. 
Currently I give our staff a small swag of Moodle courses, ask them to use the standard timetable conventions and course descriptions then let them loose! Course generation and maintenance isn't a barrier for staff wishing to use Moodle. It is just finger-candy for the Moodle administrator. 
A concern that I have is that teachers may abandon crafting and
recycling their moodle classes if they are regularly overwritten. On
the other hand, they may throw up their hands in frustration when they
keep inheriting a legacy of clutter from past courses taught by
previous teachers
We just developed a course set up 'wizard'. What it does is gives the teacher the option of setting up a new course from a template or re-using one of their old courses. If they choose to re-use an old course, it does a 'restore wiithout user data' so that they get a new copy of their previously taught course with all their material but without old user data.
They put in a course id number which automatically enrolls current students from our banner database, probably you could do something similar with Firstclass.
We'll put in in contrib/moodle_enterprise next week (the one in there now has a bug if you don't set up course categories).
We just developed a course set up 'wizard'. What it does is gives the teacher the option of setting up a new course from a template or re-using one of their old courses. If they choose to re-use an old course, it does a 'restore wiithout user data' so that they get a new copy of their previously taught course with all their material but without old user data.
They put in a course id number which automatically enrolls current students from our banner database, probably you could do something similar with Firstclass.
We'll put in in contrib/moodle_enterprise next week (the one in there now has a bug if you don't set up course categories).