COURSE ALLOCATION AMONG LECTURERS USING PYTHON

Abstract

Course allocation among lecturers describes the process of allotting a set of courses to a number of lecturers. The administrators who are responsible in the allotment of courses to lecturers at least once a year are supposed to assign the most suitable lecturer to teach the courses in an efficient and effective way. However, the process of course allocation among lecturers is being done manually in most of the educational institutions through a trial-and-error manner and the lecturers’ years of teaching experience was not being considered during the allocation causing imprecision of the allocation made. Therefore, a random allocation of courses to lecturers using Microsoft Excel was done and the objective function of the solution obtained through the random allocation is compared to the objective functions of exact solutions obtained using OpenSolver and Python. The purpose of using Python is to automate the allocation of courses to lecturers in which a lecturer’s years of teaching experience is being optimized even if there is occurrence of data changes. Besides that, the computational time used in obtaining the solutions using the three mentioned approaches are compared to show the difference in terms of efficiency and effectiveness of the allocation made. Python proved to be the most efficient and effective approach as compared to the other two approaches used for this course allocation problem as Python requires the least time and effort to obtain the optimal combination of lecturers and courses based on lecturers’ years of experience.