Integration of a Course Enrolment and Class Timetable Scheduling in a Student Information System

This paper is dealing with the most important issues of two of the most significant university administrativeprocesses – the process of term enrolment with course enrolment and the process of organization of classesand scheduling a conflict-free class timetable. In the first part of the paper an introduction to the problemis set and the impact and interrelation of the two processes is explained in detail. In the second part of thepaper, the focus is on the process of class timetable scheduling, with an analysis of how severe is the risk ofhaving conflicts in the class schedule. Conflicts in the class schedule are rarely introduced due to the lackof resources, in the usual understanding of the term, but are mostly related to the availability humanresources. The analysis gives more details on the probability that the students will have a conflict in thetimetables among different courses they attend. The third part of the paper discusses some of the formalcomplexities of the course enrolment process and gives short overview of an earlier effort to overcome suchcomplexities with an introduction of a virtual academic adviser. The virtual adviser components, are thenintegrated with a recommender system that gives each student personalized course recommendations basedon historical data of courses and success. Finally, a solution is given in the form of a model that iscurrently under development in which a single unifying process is envisioned that covers both earlierprocesses. The integrated process defines a continuous dialogue between the student groups, enrolmentadministration and scheduling administration. It is expected from the solution to streamline both processesinto a fully integrated system that will improve the student satisfaction from the organization andtransparency of the administration.