Introduction

What is Skolaris?

Skolaris is an online timetable creation and cover management software for first and second level schools. It is capable of creating new timetables as well as optimising existing ones.

It is fully configurable and provides unprecedented weighted constraint checking. It is web-based with a multi-user access and a natural data protection. No installation is necessary.

Online timetable optimisation

Your data can be accessed at any time no matter if you're on your Mac laptop, Linux terminal or Windows desktop.

Forget issues with installation, compatibility, licences, manual back-ups, HTML exports, local network sharing and constant troubles with updating your desktop timetabling software. The browser is the only application you will ever need with Skolaris.

Automatic timetable creation

Exploit dozens of built-in conditions that suit your school's unique requirements and let Skolaris create a timetable for you.

Interactive scheduling

Make manual schedule adjustments, change underlying data, lock lessons in time and place and let Skolaris continue optimising.

High-quality timetables

Let Skolaris know all requirements and restrictions, it will figure out a solution beyond your expectations.

Cover management

Once your timetable is finished, Skolaris helps you further by managing your day-to-day cover. Your changes are instantly projected to the published timetable so that all students and staff always know their effective schedule.

Who is Skolaris for?

Skolaris is aimed at both organisations and individuals. Anyone responsible for creating a school timetable and striving for the highest possible satisfaction for both staff and students will benefit from using Skolaris.

No matter if you are an automatic timetabling expert or have preferred the manual way until now, if you're a member of staff or make your living creating timetables for multiple schools, Skolaris is the ultimate tool you are looking for.

Why use Skolaris?

Let us try to explain the benefits the truly automated timetable optimisation provided by Skolaris could bring to your organisation.

Happy with your timetable?

Let's say you're happy with your current timetabling software. But how is this happiness defined? Suppose you are the timetabler, usually one of very few people at each school responsible for creation of the timetable. Maybe you're using a system that's been around since the 90's and in principle hasn't changed since then. You're used to its user interface, know its strong points and limitations and you work every year with and around them to produce a timetable you think is the best your school can get. You're happy.

Measuring the satisfaction

But how is the satisfaction with the timetable measured among the students, staff and parents? How many lessons of core subjects are placed late in the day, how many subjects are not evenly distributed throughout the week, how many teachers have too many (or too few) gaps in their timetables, how many have requested specific times off and how many of these requests have been granted? How many lessons are held in unsuitable rooms? These are just some of the questions about the many timetable aspects that should be considered when assessing the overall quality of a timetable.

Skolaris can not only provide rigorous answers to these questions, but it can also automatically reduce the number of unsatisfactory elements present in a timetable, while respecting varying levels of importance among them. Thus it can offer high level of contentment with the schedule among staff and students.

Proving result quality

In order to prove the abilities of our software, we actively participate in a benchmarking project for high school timetabling, where our generic software competes successfully at solving difficult standardized scheduling problems with specialized programs created by teams from universities all over the world. We have also compiled a comparative study where we highlight the significant (objectively measured) improvements of many aspects of real-world timetables achieved when using our automatic timetable optimisation.

Optimising your current schedule

Apart from creating new timetables, Skolaris can assess and optimise existing ones. We dare say, without knowing the specific requirements of your school, that if you take your current schedule, import it into Skolaris, configure the requirements and run the auto-optimisation, it will yield measurable improvements. These would include more balanced schedules for teachers and students alike, better utilisation across specialized rooms, better observation of general room preferences and reduction of the number of lessons taught at undesirable times.

Changing the ways of timetablers at schools is as hard as any attempt to introduce a new way of doing things, in any field of human undertaking. However, we believe that for the sake of better schedules for all people involved in organisations as important and complex as schools, it is worth giving a try.

Skolaris is different

Capable

Skolaris is not just another timetabling software used just for checking teacher and class group clashes while tediously and manually placing lessons into slots, just like pinning paper colour-coded cards on a large board.

Skolaris has proven its ability to generate feasible timetables and produce solutions superior to manually created timetables.

Friendly

While versatile and configurable to the extreme, Skolaris hides deep configuration details from users unless they need to change the carefully crafted default settings. There might be no need to go through dozens of menus and check-boxes to produce a timetable.

However, every school has its own specific timetable conditions and Skolaris provides features and configuration ready to meet them.

Scientific

We are wary of boastful statements unsupported by evidence which seem to litter the timetabling software world, especially when it comes to advertisement. Therefore we have published a paper summarizing our timetabling research. It demonstrates that Skolaris is capable of creating high-quality timetables for both relatively easy and difficult problems.

We also actively participate in the Benchmarking project for (high) school timetabling of the University of Twente, Netherlands, and have found optimal solutions for several of the problems presented there. No other commercially available product can claim such achievement.

Cross-device

Skolaris is mobile phone friendly, tablet friendly, it adapts to any screen size so the students and staff always have their timetables at their fingertips.

Multi-user

Any number of users can work on the data of the same organisation at the same time. Create accounts, assign access rights and let your teachers enter their own preferences, your assistant take care of rooms, divide the work any way you wish.

Up-to-date

Skolaris is regularly updated with new and improved functionality and patches so that you always use the best and latest version.

Secure

To keep your data safe, Skolaris uses state-of-the-art token-based authentication for communication between the server and the client.

Your data is securely stored on the server, weekly database back-ups are made by the server administrators and XML export/import is provided for maximum insurance of data integrity.

Every important object within the system has assignable access rights for users and user groups, with smart inheritance scheme.

Who created Skolaris?

We are a small team of scheduling and timetabling enthusiasts whose goal is improving every-day life of pupils, students and staff at schools all around the world by means of better timetables.

We combine research in the field of high-school timetabling problems, refined design and programming skills, profound experience in development of educational information systems and dedication to the cause to produce Skolaris — a friendly online timetable creation and optimisation software with a fresh perspective on the problem.

In 2015 we formed a company called Skolaris software, s.r.o. to roof our ongoing activities.