What it takes to stop doing this by hand.
No discovery phase, no implementation partner, no six-week onboarding. What the current method costs, what changes depending on where you start, when to move, and how to leave.
What building it by hand costs.
Over a hundred hours, and a method that lives in one person's head.
A study of master scheduling practice by Columbia's Center for Public Research and Leadership found that building a master schedule commonly takes more than a hundred hours, and that in most schools it lands on one person. The report calls that person the lone programmer: the only member of staff who understands how the schedule was made and why it looks the way it does.
That is the real exposure. Not the hours, though the hours are bad enough, but the fact that the method lives in one head. When that person is out, or leaves, the school does not have a schedule problem. It has a knowledge problem.
The second cost is quieter. When time runs out, the requests that go unfilled are not chosen. They are simply the ones nobody got to, and they tend to land on the students with the least room in their day.
Source: Center for Public Research and Leadership, Columbia University, About Time: Master Scheduling and Equity, 2021.
Where you are starting from.
Three starting points cover almost every school. What you keep is different in each.
A spreadsheet
A workbook holds a schedule perfectly well. What it cannot do is search for one, or tell you that a change you just made broke a student's day three tabs away.
Research on operational spreadsheets is not encouraging: in one field audit, 94 percent of the workbooks examined contained errors. A master schedule is exactly the kind of workbook that accumulates them, because it is edited under time pressure by people who did not build it.
Source: Panko, What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors.
Paper or a board
Cards on a wall are a genuinely good way to think. You can see the whole shape at once, and you can move a piece back if you do not like it.
What a board cannot do is keep a record of why a decision was made, check a student's day against it, or exist anywhere but that room. Two people cannot work on it from two buildings, and nothing about it survives the person who built it.
The scheduler in your SIS
Keep the student information system. It stays the record for enrollment, grades, attendance and reporting, and nOS is built to hand the finished schedule back to it.
The scheduling module inside it is a separate question. It is usually the oldest part of the product, it rarely explains a miss in words, and it almost never tells you whether a better schedule exists.
Next to a legacy master scheduler.
About the category rather than one product. These differences hold across the ones we have seen.
| A legacy scheduler | nOS | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to a first schedule | Days to weeks, often with a consultant on the call. | Hours, most of it spent checking your own data. |
| How rules are written | Codes, flags and numbered constraint tables. | Sentences. Forty-one kinds, hard or soft, priced after the build. |
| What you learn about a miss | Usually that it missed. | One of twelve reasons in ordinary words, grouped by cause. |
| Whether a better schedule exists | Not answered. | A provable ceiling, computed before the build and compared after it. |
| What changes without your approval | Varies. Some write straight to the live system. | Nothing. Every change is staged, and every send is previewed line by line. |
| Price | Quoted per district, often with setup and training fees. | Under $10 per enrolled student per year, quoted for your school. No setup fee, and a login for every staff member who needs one, up to 50 people per school account. |
| What it takes to leave | Depends on the contract. | Export everything as CSV, Excel or PDF, and stop. |
When to start, and what happens.
The best moment is the week course requests close, before you have spent a month arranging them by hand.
We set up your account
You tell us who needs a login and we create them. There is nothing to install and no server to provision. Everything runs in a browser.
Your data goes in
Either your student information system is connected, which needs credentials and an administrator on your side, or you upload the spreadsheet you already keep. This is the step that decides how long the rest takes.
You clean the workbook
nOS shows you what it read and flags what will cause trouble. Most schools find things here they did not know were wrong, which is uncomfortable and useful.
You build, read, and fix
Write your rules, build, look at what missed and why, and work down the problem list. This is the part that used to be the whole spring.
You send it back
Preview every change and write it to your student information system, or export the files. Then keep the schedule open, because requests keep changing until September.
Run it alongside your old method the first year
Most schools do, and we recommend it. Build the schedule the way you always have, build it again in nOS, and compare the two. If nOS does not do better on your own data, you have lost an afternoon and learned something.
Starting mid-year is fine, with a caveat
You can bring a schedule that is already running in and use nOS to work on next year while this one continues. What you should not do is rebuild a live schedule in February. Nothing technical stops you. It is just a bad idea in a school.
If you leave, you leave with everything.
Eight datasets export as CSV, Excel or PDF at any time, with no export limits and nothing held back on a lower plan: student schedules, section summaries, rosters, teacher and room schedules, unfilled requests, and more. Calendar files come out per student and per teacher, and there is a OneRoster archive for systems that read one.
If you came from a student information system, it stayed the system of record the whole time. Nothing was moved out of it. The exports work on the public demo too, so you can see the file formats before you sign anything.
What we need from you
- Next year's course requests.
- Your course catalog, with which teachers can teach what.
- Your bell schedule, including how the year divides.
- Rooms and capacities, if you want nOS to place them.
- An administrator, only if you want the SIS connected.
Start with your own file, not a sales call.
The audit runs in your browser and tells you where next year stands. Request a demo if the number is worth a conversation.