Topic 7 of 10
Topic 7 of 10
This window is intended to help in the allocation of the lectures of courses to several terms and to enable to reuse them during the school year. You can change the number of terms in the selection Options|Limits to some number from the range 1 to 255 or to click the grid on some of the columns on the grid, which are not used yet.
The rows of the week grid correspond to the courses and the columns to the weeks or terms in the school year. If you have terms of varying lengths (often calendar weeks), you can change the number of terms in Lengths(x) cell and the name of the term by clicking the corresponding top row of this grid.
There are a wide variety of courses how they should be allocated to weeks. Some courses are used only once, whereas others are used in each term and so on.
Suppose that you have entered the numbers 12,6,9 and 10 as the lengths of four terms (corresponding to 37 calendar weeks). The task is to allocate the 54 hours of lectures to weeks so that the equation
54 = 12 x h1 + 6 x h2 + 9 x h3 + 10 x h4
is satisfied. In this case there are many solutions like (h1,h2,h3,h4)=(0,9,0,0) or (h1,h2,h3,h4)=(2,0,0,3).
In Weeks view the user can find the appropriate numbers of lectures per week easily, since Mimosa prevents of making any logical errors. Double-clicking the grid shows/hides another window on top of the grid showing the result of the allocation to the components of the active course and helps to create balanced load for teachers, classes and rooms for each term.
After allocating the courses, you can start creating timetables in Timetables view. When you have timetabled the first week, you can copy the results to other weeks (in Weeks view) with the Edit|Copy week and Edit|Paste week Special|Timetables to this week commands. Note that although the weeks (or terms) are not identical, this option allows to copy as many assigned lectures to other weeks as it is legally possible, and it can save a lot of work if different weeks have some similarities.
To create completely identical copies of some week to another week, use the commands Edit|Copy week and Edit|Paste week instead.