Course Section Scheduling: A Fall Timetable That Holds Through Leave and Closures

A timetable is easy to build once and hard to rebuild fairly

Scheduling a term starts with a policy. A section needs a room with enough seats and the right equipment, free at the section's timeslot, and an instructor qualified for the course with teaching load left. Walk the sections in order, apply the rules, and a timetable falls out. The hard part comes later, when an instructor takes leave, enrollment figures change and a building closes, and each re-walk has to land where the policy would have put it.

Today the pieces are spread out. Sections sit in an Airtable base, the instructor roster with each person's load is a Notion database, rooms are booked on Google Calendar, and the policy and the coordinator's draft sheet are in Google Drive. A re-walk done department by department, or one that forgets to hand a freed instructor's load back, produces a timetable that no longer matches the policy, and the mismatch shows up on the first day of class.

Who works in the room

One Kylon room holds the whole term. Ada is the default agent, so a question about a section, a room or a load reaches it without a mention. The draft sheet is Ryan's work in the thread, and Fin takes anything that needs a reply to faculty. When Ada finishes a re-walk, it mentions Fin with the changed sections and the instructor's email thread, and Fin drafts the reply there.

How the term is built and rebuilt

Each stage re-walks a defined set of sections in one ascending id order across all departments, under the full policy. Assignments already on the books are not exempt.

When the term shifts under the timetable

A leave notice usually arrives as an email from the department. Ada marks the instructor on leave in Notion, then re-walks every Computer Science section in id order, because a section held by someone else may now be the better home for an instructor with load to spare. The thread lists each section that changed and each instructor whose load moved, and Fin drafts a single reply to the departing instructor naming the sections reassigned.

A building closure works differently. The rooms are gone but the instructors are not, so each affected section searches the remaining rooms and keeps its instructor if it finds one. A section with nowhere to go becomes unscheduled, and the instructor who held it gets that load back in Notion. That last step is the one most often missed when the change is made by hand.

What the checks catch

• An out-of-scope section edited during a re-walk, though the policy leaves it untouched
• A re-walk run department by department, which hands a room to a later section ahead of an earlier id
• Seats remaining left at the old figure on a section whose enrollment changed but whose room did not
• An instructor whose load still counts a section that became unscheduled after the closure

What stays with people

• Approving every assignment and re-walk before Airtable, Notion or the calendar changes
• Deciding with the chair when no qualified instructor has load left
• Sending replies to instructors and chairs, which Fin drafts
• Filing the department close-out records

Integrations in this workflow

Kylon is not a student information system or a timetabling engine, and it replaces neither. It reads and writes the base, the roster and the calendar the office already keeps, and the coordination between them happens in the room.

• Airtable
• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Google Drive
• Notion
• Slack

• Airtable holds each section's room, instructor, status, enrollment and seats remaining, plus the close-out records
• Notion keeps the instructor roster with qualifications, leave status and current load
• Google Calendar carries one event per scheduled section, created after the scheduling lead approves
• Google Drive stores the scheduling policy, the room table and the coordinator's draft sheet
• Gmail is where instructors and chairs write in, and where Fin's replies wait for a person to send them
• Slack is where facilities posts closures and equipment fixes

Where to start

Take one term and one department. Connect the Airtable base and the Notion roster through grants their owners approve for this room, and make one rule explicit in the room guidelines: every re-walk runs in a single id order across departments under the full policy, and the scheduling lead approves the result before any record changes.

“A re-walk is only fair if it runs the same way every time, in the same order, under the same rules.”

Set it up with your agent

Open a new Room, add your agent and paste this prompt. It connects the tools, builds the App with you and asks for your rules one step at a time, and nothing goes out until a person approves it.