Frequently Asked Questions

General

How much does Skolaris cost?

The price depends on your country, the number of students in your organisation, the duration of the subscription and other factors. For all pricing options please visit our order page, where you can compare subscription plans and choose the best match for your school.

Is Skolaris GDPR compliant?

Consult our privacy policy to find out the details about what personal information we collect and how we handle it.

What happens when my subscription expires?

An account deactivation procedure starts:

• You immediately lose access to most services.
• Data is deleted from your account approximately two weeks after you discontinue your subscription. This protection period is in place to make sure users who forget to extend their subscription do not lose their data.
• Your account is deleted approximately one year after the subscription expires, unless you specifically ask us to speed up the deletion process.

What happens if I want to renew my subscription more than two weeks after it expired?

You simply order Skolaris and your account is reactivated. It will be empty, your data is not kept for more than two weeks after your previous subscription has expired.

Can I restore my data deleted due to expired subscription?

Yes, we back up the expired data and keep it for approximately one year. Restoration of the backup is an administrative procedure which you can request from our support. However, there is a significant fee associated with this process, of which you will be informed upon requesting the restoration.

Functionality

Can I combine students across class groups for some lessons?

Yes. It often happens that a class group has to be split for certain lessons, typically language classes or practical work. Skolaris supports unlimited number of splits (called divisions) and an unlimited number of options (subgroups) that take lessons separately.

If two or more whole class groups need to be joined for a lesson, that's no problem either. Need vertical classes? You've found the right tool.

Can I schedule lessons manually?

Yes. Skolaris fully supports manual interactive scheduling with simple drag and drop, it can reassess the whole timetable after every change so you can immediately see the result of what you're doing.

Automatic optimisation can be stopped and restarted at any point, allowing and embracing manual changes on the way.

If you know that a lesson has to take place at a specific time of the week or be placed in a specific room, scheduling and locking it manually is one way of going about it. You can also use lesson sets to set time preference for specific lessons.

Can I lock lessons in time to prevent moving them?

Yes. Although we don't recommend it, you can watch Skolaris work and see the transforming schedule right in front of you (this might take a while!). Skolaris shows the current best solution immediately when it's found. If there's a particular aspect about it you like, you can stop the optimisation, lock a few lessons in time (or place) and start the optimisation again. It will pick up where it left off.

Contrary to popular belief, this might not be the best thing to do (unless of course a lesson may only be placed in one slot). Locking a lesson in time prevents Skolaris from exploring potentially large parts of the solution space that might contain a better timetable.

If you know of restrictions for a certain group of lessons, it's best to tell Skolaris (by means of constraint or entity configuration) and not try to do its job for it.

Can you guarantee Skolaris will find a solution?

No. Anyone who says they can is lying. The mathematical complexity of the problem is such that it is actually impossible (within a feasible time frame) to tell whether a solution exists or not even for moderately-sized timetables.

That said, Skolaris has proved its worth and especially for tightly constrained schedules its ability to find a solution is exceptional. We encourage everyone, even those disappointed by previous experience with automated timetabling, to give it a go.

Sometimes a slight kick in the right direction from the user can help achieve a good solution. If Skolaris seems unable to find the right place for a group of lessons, schedule them manually and re-run the optimisation.

How long does the optimisation take?

This depends on a lot of factors, most important of which are the number of subgroups, lessons, timeslots, used constraints and the performance of your computer's CPU.

Keep in mind that the quality of the Skolaris-produced timetable will usually be much higher than the quality of a manually produced one with regard to the number of satisfied soft constraints.

We definitely do not recommend waiting for the automatic optimisation to finish while staring at the screen. Skolaris is here to save your time, not eat it away. Come back once in a while to check if this is your first run. If your data doesn't change significantly, subsequent runs will take about the same amount of time on the same computer.

Can I do something about a schedule I don't like?

Yes, definitely! It's important to realize that Skolaris itself doesn't “know” a good timetable from the bad, it only knows the health and the fitness of a certain timetable based on input data, constraints and their configuration.

Chances are that the aspect of the timetable you don't like is simply a result of Skolaris not being aware of it being bad, i.e. of a particular constraint being misconfigured, or missing.

If it's missing, we'll be more than happy to add it for you or help you simulate it using a combination of existing ones.

Can I adjust base data after a timetable has been created?

Yes. With traditional timetabling software once the timetable has been carefully tailored it's usually difficult to blend in a new or a changed requirement based for example on a late request from a teacher, a plea from local volleyball club to use the gym on Wednesday afternoons or a simple mistake in the base data, such as wrong lesson duration.

This is where Skolaris's fitness-based optimisation is at home. Just enter the new data and let Skolaris find a way to tweak the existing solution to suit the new requirements.