Course and Exam Scheduling, and Ad Hoc Room Booking Platform

The Vendor is required to provide platform to support credit and non-credit course scheduling, centralized exam scheduling, and institutional ad hoc room booking.
- Course scheduling – credit courses
• Roll over a prior schedule to create a new term or year schedule baseline.
• Validate the course catalog and faculty against approved updates so gaps can be identified and corrected before scheduling begins.
• Validate the current list of schedulable rooms and their attributes (capacity, audio-visual technology, whiteboards, instructional assets, and other scheduling attributes) and update as required.
• Create, edit, and delete course sections for a term so the schedule reflects each department's planned offerings and enrollment projections.
• Support cancellation as a separate state for sections that have already been published.
• Set a maximum number of students (enrollment cap) for each section so the system can assign an appropriately sized room and prevent over enrollment.
• Define and enforce standard meeting patterns to maximize room utilization and minimize conflicts across the institution.
• Manually hard-assign specific course sections to specific rooms or times so non-negotiable placements are locked in before the simulation runs.
• Tag a course section with pedagogical attributes (such as tiered seating, smart board, computer lab, lecture hall) so the simulation only places it in a room that meets its teaching needs.
• Assign an instructor to a section and define their constraints (such as days unavailable or research-day blocks) so the system treats these as hard rules during placement.
• Support linked lecture and lab sections (academic blocks) so the system enforces scheduling rules between them and students register for them as a unit.
• Support cross-listed sections that share a meeting time, instructor, and room across two or more courses, with combined or shared enrollment caps.
• Support shared enrollment caps with reservation rules where the total cap is split across programs (for example, 20 seats reserved for one program and 30 for another).
• Support cohort and block scheduling so a student cohort can register for all required courses in a term without conflicts.
• Support hidden block scheduling, where one block is released first and a second block is opened only after the first is filled, to manage workload and program populations.
• Run automated scheduling simulations using rooms, sections, instructors, attributes, and constraints.
• Show clear, actionable conflict reports after a simulation, identifying which sections failed to place and why.
• Suggest potential solutions when a section cannot be placed (such as alternate rooms, alternate times, or alternate instructor assignments).
• Allow authorized staff to view the schedule on a visual grid (by room, by department, or by instructor) and make manual drag-and-drop adjustments to resolve soft conflicts.
• Display instructor schedules grouped by department for review and distribution, not only by individual instructor.
• Provide schedule quality dashboards and reports for academic leaders, including room utilization rate, prime-time usage, and other strategic measures.
• Support a testing publication of the schedule that is not visible to students, allowing staff and selected test students to validate setup before final publication.
• Support course-level fee updates after schedule import and before final publication, so finalized fees are reflected before the schedule is released.
• Support final publication of the schedule to the public-facing student view at a controlled date and time, aligned with registration opening.
• Provide student-facing schedule search by program, course, time, and instructor.
• Support post-publication changes including section merges, low-enrollment cancellations, late additions, instructor changes, and room moves, with appropriate audit and approval controls.
• Schedule change is proposed after publication, identify and report which already-registered students would be affected by the change.
- Non-credit and continuing education scheduling
• Roll over recurring non-credit offerings, including instructors and times where appropriate.
• Create and publish offerings for a full academic year where required.
• Maintain fees, grading type, description, release dates, and registration information.
• Allow students or the public to browse available offerings when released.
• Provide an integrated payment gateway at the point of registration so students can pay immediately to confirm their seat, aligned with the college's selected payment platform.
• Support cancellation workflows for sections cancelled due to low enrollment, including downstream notification and refund or credit handoff for registered students.
• Create and publish a new offering mid-year without disrupting existing schedules.
- Exam scheduling
• Import or receive current term registrations after the add or drop deadline, including a flag for sections that require a final exam.
• Set exam periods, time blocks, blackout dates, and fixed events.
• Support scope control to include only courses requiring central exam scheduling, with continuing education and other identified course types excluded from the exam build.
• Group multiple sections of the same course or other defined sets into a single common exam, so students write at the same time and (where possible) in the same room.
• Set exam capacity for each room separately from instructional capacity, expressed as a fixed number or as a percentage of seats to support spacing requirements.
• Support multiple exam delivery types per room (paper, online lab, and bring your-own-device classroom exams).
• Prevent paper exams and online exams from being scheduled in the same room at the same time, due to keyboard noise interference.
• Support splitting a single exam across multiple rooms or labs when one space cannot hold all registered students.
• Lock evening-class exams to the same room and start time as the regular class, treating these as fixed events while other exams are optimized around them.
• Prevent a student from being scheduled into two exams at the same time.
• Identify and minimize hardship cases such as three exams within a 24-hour period, and flag any remaining cases for manual review and possible deferral.
• Consider instructor availability and supervision preferences during optimization.
• Allow an instructor invigilating two paper exams to request that both exams be scheduled at the same time and in the same room (such as the gym), and honor this preference where possible.
• Run an automated optimization engine that assigns exams to periods and rooms based on student, room, exam type, instructor, and policy constraints.
• Report unavoidable student conflicts, hardship cases, and room or academic resource conflicts so they can be resolved manually.
- Ad hoc room booking
• Maintain room inventory across all institutional booking owners, including ownership, capacity, layout, attributes, equipment, and booking rules.
• Support cross-references between booking owners bookings made by one owner are visible to others.
• Support internal and external one-time booking requests.
• Search for available rooms by date, time, capacity, attributes, location, and room type.
• External-facing room rental availability view so external customers can see availability before requesting a room.
• Route booking requests for review and approval based on room type, department, requester, or event type.
• Prevent room bookings that conflict with classes, exams, maintenance blocks, or approved events.
• Capture setup needs such as furniture, technology, custodial support, security, or other services.
• Support service offerings booked alongside a room, including technology, facilities, and catering services, with billing integration where required.
• Support tracking of revenue-generating bookings, external rentals, room rates, deposits, and rental terms, with billing handoff if key no enables.
• Provide two-way integration with Microsoft outlook or exchange so bookings made in either system are reflected in both, preventing double-booking.
• Notify requesters, approvers, room owners, and service teams when bookings are requested, approved, changed, or cancelled.
• Report on room use, booking volume, external bookings, cancellations, and utilization.