When assigning rooms in bulk, the optimizer needs to know where you want your classes to go. These rules can be as broad as having certain subjects in a handful of buildings to specific instructor needs a certain room. That’s why you’ll need to create scheduling preferences to meet the needs of your students and faculty, which are the rules the optimizer uses when bulk assigning rooms for a term to sections.
Add a Rule
Weight and Modes
Override
To finish your rules, you can either click Save to continue working or you can click Save and Close to take you back to your list of preferences. It is best practice to save after building every two or three rules. You can have more than one preference set, but only one preference set can be assigned to each optimizer run.
We know most institutions don’t have the concept of these rules written out anywhere. To get started on creating your preferences, we have created a spreadsheet that shows examples that can easily be sent to your departments. The spreadsheet includes a “plain English statement” of what someone would say is a rule and then an example of how that would translate to a preference. This is a great way to get other departments involved to start gathering the information!
Now that we’ve discussed setting up scheduling preferences, we can discuss how to create an optimizer run, which will be covered in the next module. Running the optimizer using your newly created preference set is the best way to test your rules!
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