This year brings has a little more variety than some years in the nature of the updates. We are hopeful and confident at least some of them will improve your schedule making in the coming year.
Priority Preferences
You may now elevate a course's preferences above the pack. This is handy for rewarding people who helped you in the previous year by teaching an overload or filling an early-morning teaching spot. It is also convenient to accommodate special guests (e.g., former deans, judges, etc.).
Faculty Comments Manager
The Faculty Comments Manager has been totally re-engineered. I'm wary to say that they are actually fun to work now, but I will say they are about as close to fun as possible. The new system allows you to succinctly monitor problem spots as well as set resolved issues to the side.
Course Tethering
You now have an elegant way to address courses with unconventional meeting patterns. This is for those few classes/professors that insist on a unique scheduling scenario. You can even join more than two meetings together! Just "tether" them together, and they will be jointly presented in the end schedule.
Bulk-Entry Add Tool (Step 2)
Courseload replications aside, you've always had to enter courseload items one at a time. For admins that prefer working in larger blocks, you can now enter up to ten-semester courses at a time. And yes, you still get the type-ahead functionality that makes course entry a breeze.
Bulk Tag Assignments
While talking about bulk operations, you can now assign courses to a Tag en masse. Simply select the Tag you want to add courses to and choose the courses that should live under that Tag from your entire course directory. This operation has never been easier.
Semester Configuration
Another reasonably small but easily appreciated update is that you can now control more information about your semester. Whether it is just setting the start and stop dates or changing what days of the week your schedule displays, you can now get that looking just the way you want it.
Tab Names
This wins the small-but-mighty update of the year. If you haven't already noticed, browser tabs now display the page you are working on. This will prove super helpful to those power users who rarely have less than five tabs open at once. This update originated from last year's feedback survey, and we all have one Michael A. to thank for that inspired suggestion.
In the pipeline
As always, always, always, there is more in the pipeline. While we have many things in the works, here are a few I'm confident will be ready for you this scheduling season.
Step 5 Audit Trail
We are working on recording every modification made to the schedule in Step 5 polishing. There are numerous benefits of having this information, but the most exciting will be knowing things that have changed in the schedule since you last notified faculty, shared with students, or updated the parent system.
Customized Color Palettes
Now you will be able to define the colors used on the weekly graphical view you use to share the schedule (Step 5, Export the Schedule). You will be able to assign colors by course type or department.
Day and Eve Schedule Merging
This will only apply to schools that offer night classes. Instead of running a separate day and evening schedule, you can hit a switch on the Step 2 courseload properties screen and direct a class to the evening spot. This means running one schedule while controlling what classes may land in the daytime blocks and which get scheduled in the evening.
We hope you are as excited to use these new features in the coming year as we are to offer them.
As always, we look forward to seeing you on the scheduling pitch.
Troy.
More ofCourse feature updates
November 21, 2022
Troy Dearmitt
Troy is the CTO & Co-founder at ofCourse.
