• Fast.
  • Heuristic algorithms provide optimal solutions in seconds, even with hundreds of parents involved. Allows fast analysis of event parameters to achieve the best outcome for the school.
• Efficient.
  • Edval’s approach doesn't use swaps to find optimal solutions, leading to a much faster and significantly improved solution quality.
  • Savings of well over 50 staff hours and over 50 parent hours are easily achievable over manual scheduling methods for a school event. These algorithms exceed all other known methods of scheduling interviews in solution quality.
• Educationally Better.
  • Only EdvalPTN promotes parent preferences to prioritise their interviews. This together with the removal of the need for students in the scheduling process and teacher interview request support leads to a far better educational focus.
  • Parents see teachers they want to, teachers see parents they want to and hence more students in ‘educational need’ get the attention they deserve, with better interview schedule management.
• Low admin cost.
  • With no time negotiation needed, EdvalPTN offers low admin costs compared to other methods. Schedules can be done online, or via paper forms sent to parents. Simple!
• Powerful Reporting.
  • Shows a wide range of event statistics, idle time for parents and teachers, congestion per slot, tables of interviews requested vs. Granted per parent and a lot of other information.
  • Reports also show which parents have failed to request interviews with each teacher or all teachers. Allows the school to follow up and encourage parental involvement in their student’s education, or to determine if they have been advised by their child of the event.
• Advanced Features.
  • Edval supports two stage processing, interview limits and other technical features that other systems do not. Two stage processing is an advanced feature that allows schools to satisfy interviews but also control resource allocations directly by cleverly limiting maximum interview allocation per parent per child in two stages.
• Covers all other methods.
  • Edval’s approach supports and augments paper form submission, parent web access, immediate sequential scheduling and the most powerful heuristic batch scheduling. Schools may adopt one or more of these methods together depending on their needs,.

Disadvantages

• None.
  • There are no known disadvantages of Edval’s scheduling system.