KU School of Law

Profile

The University of Kansas School of Law is to further the knowledge and understanding of law and the legal system through a balanced and integrated program of teaching, research and service. As a unit of the University of Kansas, the School of Law serves its students, the legal profession, the state, and the broader university and academic community by developing and sharing expertise on a wide variety of legal topics, with the ultimate aim of making a significant contribution to the administration of justice in the state.

Client Requirements

The University of Kansas School of Law previously used a manual, paper-based process to create graduate level course and classroom schedules for each semester. The school scheduled courses for 8 rooms. To schedule these rooms, the school took into account the rooms’ attributes and capacities along with faculty preferences and requirements. Allofe’s SchedChek system allowed the school to manage their room occupancies efficiently.

SchedChek 

“A Room Scheduling system to manage room reservations for each school in its district as well as its central office.”

Our Solution

AllofE Solutions worked with many schools and organizations at the University of Kansas and provided web based systems and consulting in the most cost effective means possible. We reviewed the existing business rules and documentation used to manually create a course schedule.

AllofE implemented a room scheduling system that allowed them to enter and track room schedules online. AllofE also developed customized functionality to take the school’s existing business rules and automatically generated a best fit course schedule based on the parameters provided. The system supported an unlimited number of licenses/user accounts.

Phase 1: Room Scheduling System

The first phase of the project was the implementation of the SchedChek, web-based, room management system. SchedChek is a comprehensive room scheduling and reservation software tool available for academic institutions. The web-based interface allowed for anytime, anywhere access with real time updates of room schedules and reservations. It met all of the University of Kansas, School of Law’s system requirements:

• Managed and stored room capacities, attributes, details and schedules.
• Scheduled rooms for courses, meetings and other events. 
• Comprehensive Calendaring with month and list views 
• Ability to set various types of recurrence for rooms 
• Edited and Deleted Events 
• Searched rooms based on resources, attributes and layouts. 
• Tracked requests for rooms. 
• Generated room schedule and room attribute reports.

Phase 2: Customized Auto-Room Scheduler

The second phase of the project was the development of a customized module that automatically generated a best fit room schedule based on the criteria supplied to the system. It allowed the system to store course information and faculty preferences. It then generated a best fit schedule by applying pre-defined business rules to the supplied course parameters, including, but not limited to:

• Courses
• Type of course – (first year, second year, summer starter, etc.)
• Number of credits per course (1, 2, or 3)
• Number of sections for each course
• Number of small sections
• Number of expected students for each course
• Course conflicts
• Faculty preferences:
  • Class length: 50 min (3 days a week), 75 min (2 days a week), 110 min (1 day a week)
  • Preferred days of the week: For a 50 min class, would select 3 days
  • Room attributes and resources (DVD, projector, white board, etc.)
  • Preferred time of the day
  • Rooms preferred
  • Definitive room selected (must have room)
  • Class size

Effects

With the rapid implementation of SchedChek, the University of Kansas School of Law was able to immediately reap the rewards of the online room scheduling and reservation system. The multi-level security allowed them to create user logins for employees of all levels.  With SchedChek overbooking was eliminated, and introduced quick, easy, and efficient room scheduling.