[sims] Nova T6: Two Week Timetabling

[ChrisWinter]

Hi,

 

Though I have 7 timetables under my belt, I am new to using Nova T6. My school has a two week timetable, so I'm thinking about the best way to schedule this in Nova T6. Could someone advise whether Nova T6 will effectively spread the lessons of a class or block over a two week timetable when auto-scheduling. I'm not concerned that week 2 should exactly mirror week 1, just that, for example, my 8 periods of Y7 maths are split 4:4, or at worst 5:3 across weeks 1 and 2. The manual from my training course suggests that auto-scheduling within Nova T6 will evenly spread lessons across 2 weeks, but the trainer seemed to suggest that the only way to ensure this was by using Interleave. However, I can foresee some complexity/constraints that I would rather avoid using Interleave, so would rather just start with a basic two week timetable and schedule that. Can anyone confirm that Nova T6 will spread same subject lessons within a linear block and option blocks evenly across 2 weeks?

 

Thanks for your time.

[MattMitchell]

Might be easier to schedule your option blocks manually, and possibly some other stuff - it's often worth scheduling opposing English and Maths bands against each other.

 

Have you tried scheduling a small model in nova to see what it does? I'd suspect 8 lessons across two weeks could be scheduled one a day if done automatically, which may or may not be what you want. One thing that can be good with a two-week timetable is the variety it brings, and I'm not sure autoschedule would do that as fully as a human being!

[ChrisWinter]

Hi Matt,

 

Yes, I will be doing a significant amount of the timetable manually, but want to be sure that when I auto-schedule the last elements, mainly KS3 linear blocks, that it will spread the lessons sensibly. I would fully expect that any timetabling software should do this, but as I said in my original post the Capita trainer at copurse I recently attended seemed to suggest that Nova T6 might be somewhat limited in this respect and was pushing the use of Interleave (which I don't want to use). Unfortunately the course only involved creating a one week timetable, so I didn't get to explore this properly. As you suggest, probably the best thing would be to satisfy myself via a small experiment, but it would be great to hear from anyone who has used Nova T6 to do a two week timetable - there must be hundreds of people out there!

[Bernie]

An effective way of ensuring a good split /spread is to use the 'Optimize' screen.

 

In the middle towards the top of the screen there are some fields showing 'Day', 'Per' and 'Wk' together with the NCY groups. Type 'H' in all the 'Wk' fields and 'L' in the others. Then click on the 'Score' radio button.

 

This will then show all blocks ordered by how badly they are split between the weeks. Highlight one of the blocks in the timetable panel towards the bottom of the screen and click 'Search'. This will show you all the possible periods that the block can move to. You may well need to increase the depth of search to find any.

 

The Optimize screen is really useful for improving a timetable - I use it a lot! Particularly for two week timetables!

[ChrisWinter]

Hi Bernie,

 

Thanks for this comment. I think Optimise could be the key to achieving a good two week timetable. I like to manually schedule the whole of KS4 and KS3 core subjects (ensuring a good spread by design); then auto-schedule the 6th form, which has quite a lot of flexibility in the teacher teams, due to deliberate splitting of classes; then auto-schedule KS3 linear blocks. This approach has always worked really well in my school, but in the past I have used Timetabler, which does spread lessons evenly over two weeks. I think Optimise could provide the functionality I need. Do you actually schedule using Optimise (I believe this is possible), or schedule first and Optimise afterwards?

[MattMitchell]

Don't forget the one-per-day rule: if this is turned on for a block, then the lessons will be more spread out ;-)

[Bernie]

Hi Chris, I generally schedule in a similar way to you i.e. manually schedule some of the Option / Core blocks then automatically schedule the rest.

 

I generally use the 'Auto' screen for this although there's other ways of doing it. A useful tip is to make the sure the Auto screen is sorted by 'Recommended' as Nova will then try and schedule the more difficult blocks first.

 

For non-linear blocks which are normally the last to go in (i.e. streams rather than sets) I generally schedule them without building first - use the 'Blocks' screen to do this. And then build the block in the Block screen.

 

I don't think you can schedule using 'Optimize' though.