The primary role of Schedules is to specify what times during the day LabStats should include data from. Schedules ensure that report calculations only include the selected time periods—serving as a filter and resulting in clear and accurate reports.
By default, calculations are based on a twenty-four hour time period. Labs available for the full twenty-four hours and labs available for three hours can/should have different definitions of 100% utilization.
Related: Understanding Schedules in LabStats
What this tool can help you solve
One common use case for this would be when evaluating how full your computer labs are on average each day. If you pull a report that includes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, your percentages are going to be quite low since the lab probably doesn’t see any use for a lot of that time. Pulling a usage report on a lab that sees 90% usage during active hours, but 0% usage for the other 16 hours of the day, will throw things off quite a lot!
An Assigned Schedule would tell the report to only include information gathered from specific days and times, like Monday through Friday from 8am-5pm for example. This can be tailored to fit lab hours so that your reports are always showing accurate usage information.
Recommended schedules to create:
- Finals week
- Semester
- School year
Set up a Schedule
- Navigate to Admin, then click Schedules.
- Click Add Schedule. Enter a name, a description, and then assign the schedule to any desired groups. Click Submit.
- Click Add Named Block. Named Blocks are periods of time that are defined within a schedule and used individually as report criteria.
- Enter a name, start time, end time, and the days of the week for the new Named Block.
- Click Submit to save.
- Click Add to create additional Time Blocks in order to specify different hours on different days. Named Blocks are able to contain multiple Time Blocks.
- Additional Named Blocks can also be added to separate different types of hours (such as “Open to the Public” or “Reservation Only”).
Schedules allow Closed Dates to be defined for recurring days that labs will be closed.
Schedules in the Remote Access Dashboard:
Schedules DO NOT affect whether or not stations are displayed or available through the Remote Access Dashboard. They also do not offer any method of reserving or blocking out stations for use at specific times.
Related: Remote Access Dashboard
