

Share HN: Some schleps in academia that might be fixable with software - impendia

I&#x27;m a junior professor in math at a large state school. I was just talking with a colleague about how much thankless schlep work our junior administrators (i.e. the assistant chair) have to do.<p>Here is one example. We run ~75 classes a term, and we have to schedule who is going to teach what, where, and when. This is subject to all kinds of constaints: space limitations; remedial classes get assigned to grad students; Professor So-and-So hates mornings; Professor Whosit hates the evenings; and so on endlessly.<p>Currently our assistant chair handles this by having everyone fill out a form, and with an Excel spreadsheet. It is a <i>huge</i> chore, a <i>complete</i> pain in the ass, and totally thankless (that person assigned to teach College Algebra at 8:00 will still remember it five years later...)<p>It occurs to me that this is a problem that might be solved with good software. And that this is only representative of the kind of problems academics face. Get the attention of the assistant chair in any academic department (other than perhaps at rich private schools) and he or she will tell you about all sorts of obnoxious work which he&#x2F;she doesn&#x27;t see any way around gutting out the tedious way.<p>It seems that there&#x27;s a potential market for software, and a potential for a startup here. (Unless someone is already in this space -- but I&#x27;ve never heard of anyone using such software.)<p>Your market would be individual academic departments (<i>not</i> entire universities), and you could probably sell good software for a couple hundred bucks a year. You would need to keep in mind that departments don&#x27;t trust university administrators to do these kinds of things for them, which is why you see professors doing it.<p>Just an idea that occurred to me.
======
drobilla
Not quite as easily solvable with software as you might think. Most such
scheduling problems are NP-hard.

~~~
impendia
I'm convinced _that_ part of it is easy. To do it optimally is NP-hard, but
one doesn't need to find a perfect solution.

The problem is that solutions are always a little bit ill-defined and won't be
100% captured by any generic software model, and that they need to be amenable
to further semi-manual tweaking.

~~~
japhyr
I have been a middle school/ high school teacher for 15 years, and I have
watched countless hours spent on inefficient approaches to scheduling. I have
also recognized that it is not a trivial problem to solve. I started writing a
program to help with the problem years ago, but didn't make the time to see it
through, as I wasn't the one doing scheduling.

I think an overall approach would be to present a number of schedules that
could work, and expect the user to do some manual adjustments. Perhaps present
a schedule that could work, user checks off which classes to keep, and program
shuffles other classes. Repeat until done. I think that's basically the
approach people use when they do it manually.

------
ig1
Try googling "scheduling software academic" there's a bunch of solutions out
there.

