Timetables & Rooms
===
## Procedures
### Timetable:
Start: In the fourth week of the previous semester.
1. Clean up the overview of all lectures and list which course can/must be held next semester (according to the examination regulations).
2. (This is not done currently, but would make the work easier) Collect all time constraints of the lecturers
3. In the "Leitungssitzung" the lecutures are assigned to the responsible lecturer.
4. Clean up and complete the schedules of all minor courses that statistics students can take next semester (this is necessary because I usually only get a handful of responses when I ask how they plan to do next semester) -> see: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tWI7oe1ztmABuYEWrLglDYBxY9xIhJyAgvMkptmK21A/edit#gid=1046872125
5. Adding the next semester to the Google-Docs in 3 and send out asking other departments to fill out the plan for the next semester (is usually only done by 50%).
6. Preparation of a time schedule -> see: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iPayNc54pJks6swzuv2--UTO4ptYFl6JLUR-aD1tnzI/edit#gid=0
a. Discuss the schedule with the Department of Mathematics, the Department of Sociology, the Department of Computer Science, and the Department of Bioinformatics.
b. If you do not receive a response within a few days, create a spreadsheet of the previous year's schedule and use that instead -> see: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MmNw18aOftIutddpFv1FrycFvdZgQ9j6OmCZt8MRrMM/edit#gid=0
c. Modify the schedule if needed and discuss it again with the Department of Mathematics, the Department of Sociology, the Department of Computer Science, and the Department of Bioinformatics.
6. Ask all teachers at the institute if the schedule is ok
a. Modify it if necessary
b. Discuss it again with the Department of Mathematics, the Department of Sociology, the Department of Computer Science, and the Department of Bioinformatics.
7. Inform all departments who can take either the 30 or 60ECTS statistics minor of the current schedule
8. Book all rooms before the deadline. (This is usually in the beginning November and Mai)
9. Write to everyone at the statistics institute that he/she should now decide which exercises he/she wants to hold
10. (This is not done, but something like this is necessary) Listing who and how many lecture hours the individual person has (or divided into groups) and in which language the exercises can be held.

Now there is a 1-2 month break where I/we only discuss minor things.

11. Check which booking of the rooms was accepted and which was not
a. If the lecture room does not meet the requirements (e.g. blackboard, beamer missing), then try to find another room, possibly also by making arrangements with other faculties
b. If we don't get a room, we look for a new date and discuss it with the responsible person, the department of mathematics, .....
c. Checking on the large minor subjects (VWL, BWL, ...) of statistics students (it may be that these times have changed as well and we usually won't be informed about it).
12. Sometimes the type of lecture/exercise changes and this then results in a conflict in the schedule (e.g. only 1 and not 2 exercise sessions, needs a cip pool) -> find a new timeslot and room
13. Remind everyone that they need to hold an exercise class and that this information needs to be entered into the Google Docs in 5.
14. Look for people who are willing to hold the exercise session that are still open.
15. In the two weeks leading up to and during the first week of the semester
a. need to resolve any time conflicts with minor subjects that were not anticipated
b. Search for PHD students who can help out in exercises that are still open

End: In the second week of the semester to be scheduled.

### Seminars
1. ask who would like to teach a seminar course in the coming semester.
2. collect all necessary information about the seminar courses.
2. Remind everyone that (in most cases bachelor) seminars are still needed.
3. set up lsf
4. assign students to seminars (depending on priority and progress of bachelor/master).
5. share the information about who is attending which seminar with the students and instructors.

### Tasks: Room booking
- Lecture room booking (there is actually only 1 month break because we have to change something all the time).
- Exam room booking (remember that you also have to book the retry exams -> you also have to work during the semester break).
- Seminars have to be set up in the LSF
- Other block courses etc. have to be booked.

## Problem(s)

**Please add problems in this context not listed yet**

*Timetable generation is complex:*

- coordinating timetable generation and room bookings both within the department and across other depts. with which we share lectures take a lot of time and effort - lots of complicated constraints that must be considered.
- with the recent growth in staff and complexity of currricula, it is no longer a task ("Dienstaufgabe") that some poor PhD student (i.e. Hannah B.) can be expected to just do by themself "on the side", without receiving a compensating reduction in teaching duties or sufficient support from colleagues.
- Coordinating the schedule has a long learning curve (about two years, since you have to think of different things in the summer semester than in the winter semester)

*Tasks are distributed so that they create lots of blocking:*

- our current system assigns responsibilites for the booking of lecture rooms and for generating time tables to different people.
- Room booking is done by a student assistant that works on this for 1h/day, and LMU room management usually takes a couple of days to confirm requests.
- In combination, this means that room requests take multiple days to be answered, so the person trying to figure out our timetables spends a lot of time waiting for confirmation of room requests and can't proceed.

*Lack of cooperation and coordination within the institute:*

- PhD students increasingly often on "research contracts" without mandatory teaching
- too little German speaking teaching staff available: difficult to find people for bachelors courses
- different standards across groups whether/how much teaching people without contractual obligations are expected to perform
- responsibilites for exercises, labs, tutorials are currently not being assigned in the faculty meetings that assign responsibilites for lectures and people need to be recruited informally afterwards
- Thomas Augustin and Hannah report that it has become increasingly difficult to recruit people for tutorials and exercise sessions even though, on paper, we should have sufficient teaching staff. Needing to send out multiple begging emails in order to recruit staff for open courses wastes lots of time and energy.

*Lack of cooperation and coordination across faculties/depts:*

- lecture times in CS, maths etc determine constraints for our own lectures, but these are typically only known/communicated very close to the relevant deadlines for booking lecture halls etc
- makes timetable generation an iterative problem: send proposals out to other depts., wait for responses, start over

### LSF for exam administration

* starting next summer, we can use LSF for exam administration (as most of LMU already does)
- exam registration for students can be done via LSF
- students can choose a specific lecture/exam for a module in their study plan (e.g. for electives)
- grade lists can be uploaded via LSF (who does that needs to be clarified)

* Added/changed duties:
- Link lectures to available modules in LSF (only for new lectures, lectures from previous years can be reused)
- Add exams to LSF (is already done in order to book rooms)
- Support for lecturers?

(VS: LSF can also be used for planning seminars / distributing students to seminars)

## Possible (partial) solutions

*Just brainstorming here, we can discuss feasibility/desirability/efficacy in depth when we meet. Please comment/add ideas.*

### faculty meetings ("Lehrplanungskonferenz") must also assign explicit responsibilites for exercises/labs/tutorials

A. in the sense that specific staff are explicitly assigned to every exercise/lab being offered
**+**: also covers cases like very small groups with too few teaching staff or temporary faculty who have no staff of their own
**-**: often not known who will be available for teaching what 1 year in advance; makes planning inflexible

B: in the sense that responsibility is assigned to a group and they make their own arrangements internally.
**+**: more flexible -- easier/quicker faculty meetings
**-**: does not help people in small groups that need to rely on staff from other groups
**-**: you have to know half a year in advance how many people in the group will speak german.

also: set exam dates collectively, provide lecturer availabilities, available hours per language per chair, tabulate lecture hours provided by whom/from which group, include (planning of) seminars

### lay off student assistant for room booking and have the same person be responsible for both timetables and rooms:

**+**: avoids additional delays from unresponsive student assistants
**-**: slightly higher workload for the person responsible

-> Reply from Hannah: No, it's a 10 hour per week job.

**bad idea unless we get a dedicated person that takes over all coordination responsibilities**

### give a teaching load reduction to the person doing this

seems obvious to me, and obviously unfair that this is not being done already.
**-**: Still, because of the long training period, it is very inefficient to have a Ph.D. student do this.

ATM 1d/week. Unusually much because of re-accreditation. Should be doable with 5-6 h / week once used to the job, if supported by student assistants. but: accreditation by others (maths, sociology) coming up, will break schedules again.

### use software to generate timetables:

[FET](https://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/) is FOSS and able to handle complicated constraints.

*General Comment*:
After creating the timetable (which has to be done only after an accreditation), you can copy the one from the previous year and "only" have to adjust the problems caused by
- another person gives the lecture
- another department had an accreditation

**+**:

- works rather well (for small problems) IME -- used this for the ESG datascience timetable some years ago;
- would guarantee that timetables are without conflicts if we supply the constraints correctly.
- faster/easier/more reliable to run a program versus puzzling it out manually
- could be one way to distribute workload more evenly: one person from every group supplies the FET files for the teaching staff from that group and the courses/lectures they offer. FET files describe the relevant constraints for persons (e.g. "not available Friday after 14:00") and courses (e.g. "can't overlap with lectures X, Y and Z", "no lectures on Wed afternoon")

**-**:

- fairly high up-front investment to encode all the constraints for the courses we offer in the file format used by FET
- not sure how easy/hard it is to include lectures offered by others in the constraint set (e.g. "Analysis I" offered by maths dept at specific fixed times)

### hire (non-academic) person to take care of this (timetables and rooms)

you don't really need the qualification you need for doing a phd, so the most efficient and ressource-optimal thing would be to hire a specific person for this? this person should also do the planning for seminars and book rooms for exams etc.

**+**:

- solves the "unfairness" issue
- possible synergies with exam administration
- cheaper than PhD
- This person does this for longer than just a few years -> Coordination becomes easier over time
- Tasks currently split across multiple people can be assigned a single person (Hannahs tasks + e.g., teaching evaluations, organizing student seminars, ...)

**-**:

- costs money - not sure where to take this from? But we spend so much for other - less useful - stuff that this could be a good idea imo
- does not solve the cooperation issues

**?**:
- Paid by *Studienzuschüsse*? Can only used for "better" studies

### the cooperation issue has to be discussed in the leitungssitzung

- don't think that in the end all chairs will do it the same way, but everyone should be aware of the above problems and group leaders responsible to make sure that their employees do (on average over the group) what they are obliged to do
- I think we need the teaching obligation per chair as a number, each semester. "we" in the sense of "someone", I guess Thomas Augustin should be at least informed.

### This is a suggestion for a solution (by Hannah)

*General Comment:*
This idea is based on how the other departments organise their scheduling of the next semester, seminars, etc. I strongly recommend someone to do this over a longer period of time because:
- the learning periode is long
- every time we change a person, every other department has to learn in the person of the statistical institute.
- A lot of tacit knowledge is needed, which I am trying to summarize at the moment, but I will not succeed in writing all of it down.
- Many examination regulations should be known, and many of the regulations are not so easy to understand.

*Staff:*
1. A staff person who has 5-6 hours a week to coordinate the schedule, room booking and seminars. This person should do this for a longer period of time, not just a few years, as coordination becomes easier after two years. (Note that more time is needed before the room booking deadline, just before the semester, and during the first two years.)
2. Hire one or two student assistants (about 20 hours per week).

*Division of the work:*
Here I refer to the process described above. Provided that the person responsible is already familiar with the exam regulations, it should not be so time-consuming to check everything that the working student has done.

Timetable Coordination:
- 1, 2, 3, 8 can be done by the student assistant. Note that this should be checked as it can be complicated (in my opinion) at the beginning.
- 4, 7, 9, 10-15 should be done by the long-term staff.
- 5, 6 a student assistant can help check if something went wrong in the planning. But communication with our institute and other institutes should be done by a long-term staff.

Seminars:
- 1,2,5: has to be done by the long-term staff person
- 3,4: can be done by the student assistent, but should be checked by the long-term staff person.

Room booking tasks:
- Anything that is a month in advance and not incredibly important, the student assistant can book.
- If a room is needed within a month, then the long-term staff person books the room
- Use software where everyone enters their request for the lecture rooms.
- The software sends the booking to either the student or the staff person (depending on how much time is left).
- One cannot request a room unless all the information is given to book the room
- One can also ask for additional time options or preferred rooms

### Thomas' opinion

#### Best option

Hire non-scientific staff at 0.75-1 FTE (full time equivalent https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vollzeit%C3%A4quivalent) as a "teaching coordinator". This person would be responsible of all orga around teaching, including scheduling and room booking (courses + exams), finding/assigning lecturers/TAs when necessary, gathering seminar proposals, keeping track of over/under-fulfillment of teaching duties, etc. The position would be assigned/supervised by the dean of studies.

I've seen this play out super smoothly in the Netherlands (where there was a full-time position for all that in smaller departments than ours). Benefits:
- Great to have a single person on top of everything.
- Very convenient for all others to know where to go to.
- Frees up lots of research capacity of people currently doing (large) parts of this on the side.

I doubt that anyone would be fundamentally opposed to the above, the main issue is obviously finances. It's unlikely the dept can afford an additional position at the moment, so we would need to give up on 0.5-0.75 FTE scientific staff. Since this frees a lot of mental capacity, I still think it would be a net positive in terms of scientific capital. This capital is currently bound in the dean of studies' group, so it would make sense to trade one position there.

A second issue is that non-scientific staff normally needs to be given a permanent contract. As far as I know, PhD/Postdoc positions (even "Haushaltsstellen") are technically not available permanently, so the university administration would need to play along.

If the above doesn't work, it seems like assigning duties, a significant amount of HiWi-hours, and a significant reduction in teaching load to permanent staff would be best.

#### Misc

- I'd suggest that Fabian (or I) also ask the current dean of studies (Thomas Augustin) for input/views.
- Can we get a rough count of number of active teaching staff (lecturers/TAs) and courses taught per semester?
- For assigning TAs:
- Each prof discusses in their group who's TAing for what course.
- Check if there's too much/too little capacity in the group for teaching the courses they're responsible for.
- This info should be in the google doc *before* the Lehrplanungsitzung.
- Profs with too little capacity can try to arrange "borrowing" suitable staff from other groups beforehand.
- At the Lehrplanungsitzung we figure out how to fill remaining gaps (just as we do for lectures already).

-----------------------

other institutes:

- sociology: Schambach
- phi: Wirsing -> von Hannah: Thomas Wyrwich
- maths: ?? -> von Hannah: Schörner
- CS: johansen / barth
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