The concept of joint teaching

The concept of joint teaching is about managing activities that should be jointly taught from one or many courses/papers. The classic example is when a certain number of activities are being shared across multiple courses, e.g Computer Science 101 and Engineering 101 both start with three weeks of statistics. So to save resources, the activities form the Statistics course part are jointly taught across the two courses.

This is usually a very manual process where resources are either double booked, or there is a lot of manual editing of reservations. In many cases it's also dependent on either the experience of the scheduler or on some comment submitted in an email or a spreadsheet.

The way TimeEdit solves the joint teaching scenario is to a.) easily gather this information from the teachers or academics and b.) merge the jointly taught activities into one activity. This is to make sure the jointly taught activities can be scheduled in an efficient way using the AutoPilot, as well as making sure resources are not double booked and statistics are not being corrupted.

Glossary and terminology

A clarification of some new terminology and terms that will help you read this article

• Joint teaching match - a number of activities that are supposed to be merged into a single resulting activity, to be jointly taught
• Unmatched activity - An activity marked for joint teaching, that is yet to be added to a joint teaching match
• Joint teaching object - the primary object of the submission that the activity should be jointly taught with. Should have corresponding activity on the other submission
• Match score - an estimation of the likelihood that this activity should be jointly taught with the selected activity
• Matching elements - The elements used for calculating the match score. Timing, duration, activity type and general datasource
• Merging a joint teaching match - the act of combining all activities in a joint teaching match into a new activity

The process