Creating an Online Scheduling Tool for our Community Education Campus

Problem:  Our Community Education Campus has 29 classrooms, five computer labs, and nine meeting rooms.  Scheduling had previously been accomplished with paper calendars hanging on each door.  This was inefficient, difficult to coordinate, and often lead to double-booking.

Data Gathering:  Our front office team asked me to find a better way of scheduling our rooms.  Some scheduling within our district was being done with Google Calendars, but that wasn't a viable solution for the number of rooms invovled.  Many subscription-based services were available, but most were out of our price range.  I found a program called phpScheduleIt.  phpScheduleIt is a free piece of software that runs on our Metro South ABE web server.

Implementation:  I mocked up a prototype and made it available for a small group of people to use.  Their feedback helped to guide the process.  We implemented using staff Google account credentials to ease logging in and password management.  I created a training video, giving people an easy 3-minute introduction on how they could schedule their rooms and computer lab time.

Outcome:  We've now used this system for almost five years.  phpScheduleIt has made our resource management much easier.  Staff members can reserve classrooms for prep time, meeting spaces, and computer lab time.  It's easy to search for available spaces.  When we built our Bloomington College and Career Academy in 2015, we included it in our room reservations system.