Brief History of UC's Academic and Event Scheduling System

The UC Registrar’s Office purchased a software package in July 1996, called Resource25 from CollegeNET in Portland, Oregon. When the software was first purchased, it was marketed by Universal Algorithms. UAI was subsequently purchased by College Net.  The product included Schedule25 and Resource25. 

UC, along with many other Ohio institutions, purchased this software at a substantial savings through the MHEC (Midwestern Higher Education Commission) Academic Scheduling Software Program. The MHEC, acting under its interstate compact authority to enter into program agreements to benefit higher education, selected UAI to provide course scheduling software products to colleges and universities in its member states.

Resource25 (also called R25) is a campus-wide class and event scheduling software which unifies all users on a single database. The primary reason the Registrar’s Office purchased Resource25 was classroom scheduling, because the software has a sophisticated batch scheduling component called Schedule25. Two colleges began using the classroom scheduling features of Resource25 in a limited fashion: the College of Medicine in 2000 and Clermont College in 2001.

Resource25 continued to be enhanced by the vendor, and in December 2001 UCit purchased the WebViewer component which provides a Web interface to the database. In February 2003, a committee of representatives of the university, including Governmental Relations & University Communications, reviewed several options and selected R25 to implement a master calendar of non-academic events at UC. The R25 WebViewer was an important factor in that decision, because it allows the master calendar to be displayed on the Web. The Medical Center also selected R25 as their Web calendar in February 2003.

Campus Scheduling began using R25 to reserve spaces for non-academic events in mid-2003. A large percentage of the university’s west campus non-academic events are handled through Campus Scheduling, so they were a natural choice for early implementation. In September 2003, the UC Web calendar went live with non-academic events from Student Affairs and Services, CCM, and Campus Scheduling.

Efforts continue to implement campus units that would like to participate, so their non-academic events will be posted on the university calendar. This calendar serves as the official events calendar for the university. The ultimate goal is to eliminate individual unit calendars that don’t use the R25 database, thereby creating consistency of information across all calendars and providing a one-stop spot for event information for both internal and external visitors to the university’s Web site.

Work is also underway to import academic classes from UniverSIS into R25, so room schedulers will have complete information about room availability.