Subject

A subject is the discipline taught by a course: maths, physics, English, accounting law, machine learning, project methodology… The subject is the pure discipline; the course is that subject applied to a specific class.

For each country, Omniscol provides a catalog of common subjects (sometimes a few hundred, sometimes a few thousand depending on the official nomenclatures), pre-filled at account level. If a subject is missing, you create a custom subject in Create.

Vocabulary in higher education

The pedagogical nomenclatures of French higher education use different aggregation levels:

• UE (teaching unit) — a set of courses / modules,
• EC (constituent element) — a sub-unit of a UE,
• ECUE (constituent element of a UE) — even finer-grained,
• module — the generic term in continuing education.

All these levels map to the Omniscol "subject" entity. If you need to represent the pedagogical hierarchy itself (UE → EC → ECUE), do it through a naming convention (for example prefixing the codes: UE3-EC2-ECUE1 Algèbre linéaire) or through the subject families.

Subject copied into the timetable

When you assign a subject to a class in a timetable, Omniscol makes an internal copy of the subject inside the timetable structure. This is a deliberate choice: if you later delete or rename the subject at school level, the existing timetables keep their historical version. Consequently, check the spelling of custom subjects before using them in timetables — a fix made afterwards does not propagate to the timetables already configured.

Associated course type

When assigning a subject to a class, you can specify a course type (tutorial, practical, exam, lecture…). The (subject, type) pair forms an independent identifier: for example, the "maths course" and the "maths tutorial" are two independent entries in the timetable structure.

Required classroom specialisation

A subject can require a classroom specialisation (chemistry → chemistry laboratory, sport → gym). This constraint is respected strictly by the solver. See classroom specialisation.

Pedagogical weight

You can set a pedagogical weight on a subject in a class: the solver will then aim to balance the subject across the days of the week rather than concentrating everything.