General Overview

The EMS Academic Planning feature works in concert with the Student Information System. Courses are "scheduled" for the term in the Student Information System (course title, date/time, instructor, etc. are recorded in the SIS).

The Registrar(s) determine when the bulk of the scheduling is completed for the term and work with the Academic Scheduler(s) to coordinate when the course schedule for the designated campus is "synchronized" with EMS (i.e. course information is fed from the SIS to EMS through an interface).

Once the course schedule is synchronized, the Academic Scheduler performs a variety of tasks such as interpreting academic preferences (e.g. audio visual equipment, room set up) and configuring academic holidays. The Academic Scheduler can use the EMS "Optimization" feature or manually assign courses to space.

Once the space is assigned in EMS, the room location is "written back" to the Student Information System, thereby recording the room location in the Student Information System, which is the source database for the course. (EMS is the source database for the assigned space only).

Implementation of the EMS Academic Planning feature at Tufts University

The Medford Campus uses the EMS Academic Planning feature and partial optimization (in EMS) to schedule all of their academic courses.EMS Academic Quick Reference-Medford Campus.docx
The Boston campus piloted the EMS Academic Planning feature (no optimization) in the Fall of 2013 and Spring of 2014 terms only.

Because not all of the Boston campus academic courses are scheduled in the Tufts Student Information System (iSIS), the Boston campus did a one-time feed of the course information from iSIS to EMS. After this one-time feed, changes to courses (new courses, cancellations of courses, changes to dates/times/enrollments, etc.) were made in iSIS by the Registrar and communicated by the Registar to the EMS scheduler so the appropriate adjustments could be made to the room assignment.
On the Boston campus, a course with a single "meeting pattern" (day/time of week that the course is offered for the term) may be held in several different rooms during the term. Because the EMS-iSIS "write-back" process sends the assigned EMS room location back to iSIS based on the room assigned to the meeting pattern (ex. M-W, 6-9pm), the Boston campus had to disable the Write Back feature. For this reason Registrars were responsible for alerting their students/faculty of course room locations using methods that were outside of iSIS and EMS.

Although the Boston campus pilot using the Academic Planning feature was successful, the one-time feed of courses from iSIS to EMS was suspended as of April 2014 due to limited resources for managing the academic scheduling process. Therefore at this time, all courses held on the Boston campus are scheduled directly in EMS (by EMS Schedulers) as "events".

Below is documentation that was used during the pilot phase of the Boston Campus Academic Planning effort (the one-time feed of course information from iSIS to EMS, with the "Write Back" function disabled).

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