Table of Contents
Overview
Room & Building Preferences
Assigning Rooms Manually
Assigning Rooms via the Section Optimizer
Related Article
Overview
Depending on how an admin set up your room template, some rooms will be defined as centrally owned whereas others might be owned by certain departments.
When making room assignments, Department Schedulers will have access to the rooms that have been assigned to their Departments, in addition to the centrally owned rooms that have been released for scheduling.
Rooms can be assigned manually or – if you’ve already successfully scheduled more than one term in Coursedog – via the Section Optimizer.
This article will walk you through both, though you will need to read this article for an in-depth guide on using the Optimizer.
Room & Building Preferences
Depending on how your institution has set up its Section Template, you might be able to define room and/or building preferences.
If you wish to define preferred rooms, and those fields are in the section details, you can multi-select from the dropdown.
Whether or not you can define a single preferred building or multiple buildings depends on whether your template has the “preferred building” (single select) or “preferred buildings” (multi-select) fields.
If the room or building you’re searching for doesn’t appear, you can manually input a search value for related options to appear.
Assigning Rooms Manually
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Section Dashboard
You can assign rooms to sections in the same place you assign instructors and meeting patterns.
Step 1:
Click on the section you wish to assign a room to; this will open the section editing modal.
You can click anywhere on the section row.
Step 2: Navigate to the “Meeting Patterns & Rooms” card and click into the field that says “Not set” under “Room”.
Step 3:
Look through the listed rooms in the rooms modal to find the best fit.
Coursedog automatically sorts rooms by their preference fit, allowing you to quickly see which room is the best fit.
If enrollment capacity is entered on the section, rooms will be default filtered to only show rooms greater than or equal to enrollment capacity
This can be toggled off to show all available rooms
If you want to see the preferences and why Coursedog thinks each room is a good or bad fit, just hover over the “i” for more information.
By hovering your mouse over the “i”, you can see the preference conflicts for each instructor (provided you have gathered faculty preferences).
In the below example, EH100 fits all the instructor and section preferences, and it is available, making it a great choice for this section.
When searching through rooms, the system will evaluate the search query against the following fields: Room Display Name, Room Full Name, Room Number, Room Notes, Room Features, Room Type, and Room ID.
Red Messages
If you see a red message when hovering over the “i” regarding building preferences not being met in instances where the section does not have a “Preferred Buildings” field value specified, check in with your Admins to confirm your Section Template configuration.
If your institution transitioned from using the single-select “Preferred Building” field (which has since been deprecated) to utilizing the multi-select “Preferred Buildings” field, the old values stored for “Preferred Building” will still be present on the Back-End and inform our conflict detection algorithm even if the field has been removed from the Section Template.
If this is occurring, you can clear the values for “Preferred Building” (deprecated field) by running a Sections merge where “Preferred Building” is set to have a Default Source of Truth of “Always Institution”.
Assuming this field is not mapped in the integration, it will be cleared on the Back-End through this process.
Step 4: When you have made your selection, simply click the room, and it will be assigned to the section.
Additional Note
If every room is showing as a 100% preference fit regardless of capacity, go here for the solution.
Assigning Rooms via the Section Optimizer
Overview
Instead of manually selecting rooms for each section, you can leave that to the Section Optimizer. The Section Optimizer will automatically assign rooms that satisfy all preferences and rules, if possible. The Optimizer run is usually handled by an admin user, but if you want to learn how to run the Optimizer, check out this detailed guide.
Getting Ready to Optimize Room Assignment
In order to have a successful Optimizer run, you must have done the proper set up. Most of this was taken care of in the Section Configuration module. Anything that might affect when the section should be scheduled should be filled in; room preferences and enrollment settings are two important examples.
Make sure that you have “Optimize Rooms” set to “yes” for any section you want to be scheduled by the Optimizer.
If you do not see “Optimize Rooms” as a field in the section editing modal, check in with your admin to make sure that they have added the pre-built “Optimize Times” and “Optimize Rooms” fields into their Section Template Forms.
Sections that have been assigned manually or have “Optimize Rooms” set to “No” will not be assigned a meeting pattern by the optimizer.
