Hours allocation policy

The hours allocation policy describes, course by course, the lessons the timetable must hold: for which audience, with which teachers and in which classrooms, in what quantity and of what length. It belongs to pre-planning: it is decided before a single lesson exists, often away from the planner — an academic department settles the curriculum, the planner applies it.

It is made of rules. A rule describes a series of identical lessons:

Group A · Ms Martin · 4 lessons of 2 h

A course holds as many as it needs: one per audience, per length or per teacher that differs from the others.

A policy is optional. A course without one is allocated by hand or by automatic allocation, like any other. Where it does exist, it serves twice: it creates the missing lessons as it describes them; it measures the gap between what it expects and what the timetable actually holds, at all times.

It sits between the two things it links:

• the course and its hours volume, expressed from the student's point of view — 24 h of financial analysis, whether or not the class is split into class divisions;
• the lessons actually built on the hours distribution screen, where a volume seen once by a student may be repeated as many times as there are groups to serve.

See Allocation policy to put it to work.