Options (electives)
For your students’ choices …
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Overview of Options
Options is a well-known program for analysing and organising the subject Choices (electives) that students make in the optional part of their curriculum.
Unlike other Options software this program will automatically find the best solutions for you, without you having to guess.
You can download a free Tutorial version from this site.
Options is designed to help you streamline the annual business of arranging the subject Choices into an Options Pattern, ready for timetabling.
This process is often done for students about to enter Year/grade 10 and Year/grade 12.
It is important to:
- Get the highest satisfaction rate for the students, to let them study the subject choices they have chosen. This improves students’ motivation, and Exam results. And improves relations with parents.
But - Keep the cost of staffing the curriculum as low as possible. This is particularly important if the course lasts 2 or 3 years.
Options is designed in the same friendly and intuitive way as TimeTabler and StaffCover.
The free download version includes an interactive Tutorial which takes less than an hour to work through, during which time you see both the manual and automatic ways to create an efficient Options Pattern.
The 6 Steps
In outline, the 6 steps in using Options are:
| 1. | Students’ Names can be entered from the key-board, or (more usually) electronically from a file produced by your school or college MIS Admin System, or from a spreadsheet. |
| 2. | The students’ Subject Choices can be entered very quickly.  You have a choice of 3 different methods, including the new TOOLS system for Parents/Students to enter their Choices from home via the internet to reduce paperwork. Have a look at more details of this great new feature. |
| 3. |
Options then analyses the data for you, rapidly producing a Clash Table and other reports. |
| 4. |
Trial patterns of Option ‘Blocks’ (or ‘Pools’ or ‘Columns’ or ‘Lines’) can be quickly drawn on screen, with the Subjects arranged in any pattern,
All your patterns can be kept in a ‘Library’ if you wish. |
| 5. | Options then quickly shows you how well it would suit your students. It shows you:
Options has a number of ‘tools’ to allow you to manipulate and fine-tune the groups (for example, there are buttons to ‘Bunch’ or ‘Equalise’, so you can experiment . . . see the screen shown below). This helps you to obtain the most effective and cost-efficient Options for your Year 10 or Year 12 (‘Lower Sixth’) students, while also aiming to keep students and parents happy. |
| 6. |
When a final pattern has been chosen, and the timetable completed, the Option groups can be linked to the teacher and the room and to the scheduled times of the week, to produce neat printouts of:
This data can be exported automatically from TimeTabler into SIMS .net, iSAMS, and some other MIS. |
Video & Screenshots
Click here to see some screen-shots of Options.
Click here to see a short Video about the screens in Options.
Tutorial download
You can move to the download page if you want to download a free copy of:
- The Options Handbook. This is sent as a .pdf file that you can view (and print) using Adobe Acrobat (which is also available free).
It includes a Tutorial which takes about an hour to do. It includes 14 Worked Examples. - The free Options Tutorial program with some demonstration data. The Tutorial Handbook explains how to run the program with the sample data.
Users’ comments & Support
Click here to see what Users have said about us.
See what experienced Users say.
Now with enhanced Gold-Start Support.
If you have any queries, please e-mail them to: ask@timetabler.com
We will answer any questions you may have about using the software with your particular curriculum.
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