Hi all,
since Mannheim is an on-campus university we often have the case where parallel sessions for a class is offered with limited seats. Thus students have to apply for a seat. In the past the first-come-first-served strategy was used. It was a cause of great pain. Now we allow students to indicate which sessions they prefer and which they don't. Once the application period is over the professor triggers the distribution, can manually adjust the provided solution and either invite the users to their assigned sessions or simply assign them directy. The students receive emails once they have passed in their preferences and are invited/accepted. We use the Hungarian algorithm for the distribution. The largest scenario we had was 900 students and 8 sessions. The solution was found on a single processor box (2.4 Ghz) after 3.5 Minutes without any stress compared to the past with all the complaints. The package even supports waiting lists. The only reason why we haven't provided it to the community is because we are using our own groups and group types tables and not that of acs subsite or dotlrn communities. We synch the groups later on to dotlrn if the professor even wants to have real dotlrn communties for the groups. Also the Hungarian algorithm we've implemented in Java for performance reasons.
For most parts the professor is happy with membership lists. The package is also used for two other packages we implemented here: group competition and online tests. Below you find a link to a recording where I demonstrate how we distribute the students. There are four groups. The last is the least wantend. Thus 7 of 150 students have to be reassigned manually. We follow the traffic light concept so that the professor can easily see if an assignment is good or bad. Green is what the user wanted and a star (*) is what he got.
https://dotlrn.uni-mannheim.de/distribution.swf
Greetings,
Nima
