INNOVATIVE COURSE SCHEDULING AND CURRICULUM DESIGN

Abstract

Course scheduling is a challenging operations research problem that involves students, faculty members, availability of classrooms, class sizes and many other factors. As it is the case for most scheduling problems, course scheduling is an NP-Hard problem. Due to its challenging nature, frequently the main objective is only to find a feasible solution that satisfies students, faculty and classroom requirements rather than seeking the optimality which results in most effective teaching environment for most students. Such optimal learning environment requires the satisfaction of additional constraints such as the learning capacity of students and the capacity requirements of courses. In this research we investigate the possibility of quantifying course (curriculum) workload and the acquired capacity and suggest as curriculum and/or schedule design methodology that enables a near optimum learning environment for most students.