• Administrative savings. Central systems require no staff to run, once the event has been set up.
• Flexible. Allows parents to dictate their own schedule easily, provided there is space available.

Disadvantages

• Inefficient for teachers.
  • System is parent focused, and doesn’t allow efficient teacher schedules.
• Loss of control.
  • The school hands over scheduling to parents.
• Requires web access.
  • These systems force parents to have web access or be suitably computer literate to actively organise their own schedules online. It may seem a simple process to some, but parents may be discouraged from using such technology compared to other methods that allow paper form submission of ‘preferences’.
  • Time negotiation is not required in preference based systems, like EdvalPTN, which supports the use of paper forms readily and provides online web access as an additional input method only for those parents who are comfortable with web technology.
Poor travel time control.
• Manual systems do not generally consider suitable travel time between interviews, which can result in blow outs in schedules if parents are late moving between their appointments. Participants will often try to schedule interviews sequentially but these could be located in different rooms, which is not an easy consideration to manage manually.
• Often a few late parents can push a schedule into total dissaray as everyone has an expectation of achieving their assigned interviews, even if the start time has aleady passed.
• More organised scheduling systems manage travel time correctly to enforce adequate movement time between interviews, including recognising more travel time is needed if sequential interviews are in different rooms or areas.
• This acts as an additional control to prevent travel delays or confusion from blowing out schedules.