Academic Scheduling Preferences

Settings that indicate room type, feature, region, building and/or room preferences or requirements. These settings impact a room’s score relative to a section during room assignment. Academic scheduling preferences saved at the system level are automatically applied to sections. Individual section overrides may be applied as needed.

 

Announcement

Items of interest to be displayed on a campus calendar on a certain date.

 

Approver Group

A list of people to whom requests for events or resources are routed for approval.

 

Arranged Section

A section that has components of its meeting pattern that are undetermined.

 

Bottleneck

A scheduling deficit caused by a scarce resource or heavily used meeting pattern. A bottleneck is indicated when a section has suitable rooms but none that are available.

 

Collection

A collection is a grouping of equipment and/or services that is typically reserved as a single unit. Equipment items and services may be required or optional when reserving a collection.

 

Configuration

The name and definition of a room’s physical arrangement used for scheduling purposes. A room may have one or more possible configurations. One configuration must be specified as the default.

 

Cross Listed

A scenario that describes when two or more sections meet in the same room at the same time.

 

Customer

A customer is a client, business, organization, or other entity used in event scheduling to which one or more individual contacts are associated.

 

Customer Contact

A person that is associated with a customer. Customers may have multiple contacts, one of which is the primary contact. A person may be a contact for multiple customers.

 

Customer Group

Customer Group is a customer field that categorizes customers for reporting purposes. Examples include Student Group, Alumni Association, Community Organization, Faculty and Staff, etc.

 

Custom Field

Custom Fields are fields that are defined by users to be displayed on various record types in Astra Schedule. Custom Fields may be desired to capture information in the system that isn’t captured by default. Record types for which Custom Fields may be defined include Buildings, Rooms, Sections, Section Meetings, Events, Event Meetings, and Event Request Forms.

 

Distributed Scheduling

The term Distributed Scheduling describes a scheduling model that allows representatives on campus to contribute to the scheduling process during specific time periods per term. Their user security settings can vary during these defined periods.

 

Effective Date

A date defined for a record on which changes will occur.  For example, a room may be reconfigured to have scheduling attributes (i.e. seating, features, room type) that become available as of a certain date.

 

Event Type

The Event Type is an event record field that describes the general category of event. The Event Type is used for grouping events, primarily for reporting purposes. Examples include Student, Community, Staff, Athletic, Corporate, or any other category that is important to your institution.

 

Event Meeting Type

The Event Meeting Type is similar to Event Type, but is specific to event meetings. This field provides a categorization for types of meetings within an event record.

 

Facility Layout

A standardized physical layout type that can be associated with the definition of a room’s configuration(s).

 

Feature

A permanent room resource or attribute that is significant from a scheduling perspective.

 

Featured

A visibility status setting that allows events and reports to be highlighted on the portal.

 

HVAC Zone

Heating, ventilation and air conditioning zone; an HVAC zone defines a specific area within a building that can be affected by the buildings climate control system; definition of these zones will allow scheduling decisions that can take into account energy efficiency considerations.

 

Incomplete

An event scheduling status indicating that a room assignment is still required or that room or other resource approvals are pending.

 

Infeasible

A scenario in which a section has a combination of scheduling requirements that are impossible to meet.

 

Institution Contact

An institution contact is a person that is available to be listed as an internal contact person for an event.

 

Meeting Pattern

Meeting Patterns are the distinct combinations of Term Type, Meeting Type, days met, and start and end times.

 

Meeting Type

Meeting Types are a subdivision of courses, defining the instructional delivery type for a course section offering.

 

Optimizer

The tool used to automatically assign rooms to a large number of sections using scheduling preferences and user-defined optimization parameters.

 

Optimizer Run

Saved optimizer settings and results.

 

Permission

A permission is a specific right within Astra Schedule to perform distinct actions; permissions include rights to view, edit or delete records, and rights to request, schedule, or approve various resources.

 

Portal

A central access point to information from various sources. The Astra Schedule portal is a gateway to the application and provides configurable views of various pieces of information, both internal and external.

 

Pre/Post Event Meetings

Additional components scheduled in association with an event meeting to accommodate special activities like seating time, meet and greet, question and answer, etc.

 

Preference Set

A saved group of academic scheduling preferences. Preference sets allow reuse of different scheduling preferences to achieve scheduling goals. Examples for use include progressive room assignment optimization or regional room assignment changes based on the term type/time of year.

 

Preprocessing

A parameter setting in the optimizer that helps ensure a specific need is met before other rooms are scheduled.

 

Publish

The process of updating the production section data with room assignments made during an optimization run.

 

Region

Regions are user-defined groups of rooms that may be used as academic scheduling preferences. Regions may also be used to help define a user’s scheduling access and as a filter option in various views throughout the system to limit the scope of records returned in a list.

 

Report Part

A Report Part is a Crystal Report chart or graph that summarizes report information and can be included on the Astra Schedule portal. Report Parts must be configured as such in the Crystal Report file.

 

Report Server

The report server is a server component installed with Astra Schedule that manages the Crystal Reports integration, makes saved Crystal Reports files available, and allows the scheduling and delivery of Crystal Reports files.

 

Report Subscription
Report subscriptions provide automatic delivery of reports to anyone via email.  The recipient address, report format, and delivery interval are specified at the time the subscription is created.

 

Resource

Any schedulable item in the Astra Schedule system, including rooms, equipment, food, people and services.

 

Resource Category

Resource categories are used to help navigate and filter the equipment list for purposes of maintenance, scheduling, management, and security assignment.

Each resource may belong to only a single category. Examples might include things like “A/V”, “Furniture”, “Computers”, or “Sporting Goods”.

 

Resource Grid

A calendaring option that provides a resource-centric view of activities. This view provides at-a-glance room or resource availability.

 

Resource Group

Resource groups are used to help navigate and filter the resource list for purposes of maintenance, scheduling, management, and security assignment. Additionally, resource groups are used for purposes of specifying which resources must be approved before scheduling and by whom.

 

Unlike resource categories, groups are more like keyword tags. A resource may belong to many groups to help define the various kinds of resources being utilized on your campus. Because groups can be used (in addition to categories) to achieve user security and selection, the group tag can be applied as needed to convey the type of resource or something entirely different, like geographic location. Group examples might include “DVD Players”, “Tables”, “Laptops”, or even “Jones Auditorium”.

 

Responsibility

A person’s responsibility in Astra Schedule reflects a group or groups to which they belong. These include student, user, instructor, customer contact, institution contact, etc. The responsibility tag may affect the kind of data and functionality available for the person’s record.

 

Role

A role is a user-defined collection of permissions that is applied to a user to define their access to the application. A role’s definition can also include profiles that dictate the data elements to which these permissions apply.

 

Room Type

Room Type is a descriptive field on a room record that defines the intended overall purpose or use for a room. Room Type is used as an academic scheduling preference.

 

RSS Feed

An RSS feed is a mechanism used to publish frequently updated content from one website to another. RSS feeds can be used to add news clips or weather information to the Astra Schedule portal.

 

Scheduled

An activity status that indicates a completed record that has room(s) assigned and no resource approvals pending.

 

Scheduling Priorities

An optimizer setting that specifies the balance between subjective (preference priority) and objective (seat fill priority) scheduling.

 

Score

A numeric representation of a room’s suitability for scheduling, based on scheduling preferences and seat fill. Score is used to suggest room assignments during manual scheduling and to make room assignment during optimization.

 

Section

A Section record is a term-specific offering of a course.

 

Service

Schedulable activities often performed by a person, including setup and tear down services, usher, parking attendant, security, etc

 

Setup and Teardown Service Window

A period of time scheduled before and/or after an event meeting during which room blocking services must be performed.

 

SISKey

A SISKey is a key value that links a record to a corresponding record in another system (typically a student information system).  Astra Schedule only populates that value for any given record if the record was established either through import, or for the purposes of import.  It’s through this value that records are recognize and matched up for incoming data.  Records that are created by hand do not get SISKey's generated automatically, but in many cases a SISKey can be manually added so that it can be recognized during imports.  For example, room records that are manually created in Astra Schedule cannot be used to assign sections during import unless they have a SISKey entered.

 

Suitability

Suitability determines whether or not a room is appropriate for a course section. Suitability takes into consideration campus, number of seats, and whether or not the room satisfies any required preferences.

 

Tentative

An event scheduling status that indicates an event creation process that is incomplete or in progress. Any scheduled rooms or other resources are not reserved, and no messaging is triggered.

 

Term

Terms are defined date ranges during which course sections are offered. Terms are manually created and configured before section records are imported.

 

Term Type

Label used to categorize a term. Examples include “Summer”, “Fall”, “Intercession”, etc.

 

Usage Policy (control)

A set of rules applied to a specific room or resource that define when and if the item may be used and for what type of activities.

 

Web Part

A web part is a component that can be placed on a portal page to display information or provide access to functionality from the page.