Commuting

Many schools offer courses in a variety of locations. The school may have classrooms in more than one location, or it may offer "external" courses at a customer's site. In either case, one has two problems:

• One must allow time for teachers to travel from one location to another. If locations A and B are 15 minutes apart, and a teacher has courses at both locations, then the courses must be scheduled at least 15 minutes apart.
• Teachers deserve compensation for travel time, if it exceeds a certain amount. This compensation is both in the form of fees (to cover travel expenses) and salary (to pay for the teachers' time).

If your school has only a few such cases, it is simpler to handle teacher compensation with course bonuses, and to trust your office staff to remember how much time must be allowed between particular events.

However, if your school has many cases of teachers commuting from one location to another, you may want to allow KVS to administer this for you. This requires you to enter information about the locations where courses take place, how long the commute is from one place to another, and so forth.

How teachers are compensated for commuting time depends on each school's particular policy. While KVS cannot account for every possibly policy, the compensation model is flexible, and you should be able to come up with a system that suits your needs.

Note: the menu items referred to below are only visible if you have selected "advanced menus" from the options menu.

Overview

The basic idea underlying commuting is that of a "location". Each room in which events can take place has a location. If the same teacher is scheduled to teach two events that take place in different locations, KVS will look at the information you have entered about locations, and show a "commuting conflict" if there is too little time for the teacher to travel from one event to the next.. When the courses are closed at the end of the day, KVS will compute the teacher's additional compensation (salary and fees) for travel time.

Furthermore, each teacher has a default location where they normally teach. Even if the teacher teaches only a single course, if this course takes place away from the teacher's normal location, travel time will be computed and the teacher paid accordingly. This eliminates the need to define special bonuses for courses that take place far away from the school.

Since commuting time depends on the teacher, commuting conflicts are computed when the daily plan is opened. They appear in the conflicts window along with all other conflicts. If you are viewing the daily plan by room, you will clearly see the rooms where the courses are offered. If you are viewing by subject and teacher, then the rooms are included in the tool-tip text that is displayed when you hold the mouse over an event.

Defining commuting options

Menu item "File: Options : Commuting"

The first step is to define a set of general options pertaining to commuting.  These are entered under File:Options:Commuting. The options are:

• Default travel time. When no specific entry is found for a pair of locations, this is the time that KVS will assume it takes to travel from one location to the other. Time may be specified either in minutes (e.g. "75") or in hours and minutes (e.g. "1:15").
• Default travel expenses. When no specific entry is found for a pair of locations, the teacher will be paid this amount to cover travel expenses.
• Maximum dead time. Suppose a teacher has two courses at the same external location. If the courses are many hours apart, the teacher is entitled to travel home and then back again - thus incurring double compensation for travel time. This parameter defines the maximum amount of time between two courses (for which the teacher is not paid), before the teacher is assumed to have traveled back to his or her default location between the courses.
• Travel time. There are three options related to travel time.
  • Threshold. Many companies have a policy of only compensating travel time in excess of a particular threshold. If this is your school's policy, define the threshold here. Example: if you have set your travel-time threshold to 30 minutes, and the teacher spends 45 minutes traveling on a particular day, the teacher will be paid for 15 minutes of travel time.
  • Percent or Rate. Determines whether the teacher's travel time is a percentage of their base salary, or if it is a monetary rate. This determines how the following parameter is interpreted.
  • Amount. Either a percentage or a monetary rate (see "percent or rate" above).
    • If a percentage, then this is the percentage of the teacher's salary paid for time spent traveling.
    • If a rate, then this is the amount paid per lesson for travel time. In other words, this is entered on the same basis as teacher salaries. Example: if you have defined a lesson-length of 45 minutes, then you enter here the amount that teachers received for each 45 minutes spent traveling.
• Travel expense threshold. As with the travel-time threshold, this allows you to define an expense amount above which the teacher will be compensated. Example: if you set this to $10 (or whatever your local currency is), and the teacher incurs $15 of expenses, then the teacher will receive only $5 of compensation.

Defining locations

Menu item "Parameters : Locations"

By default, there is only a single location, which is shown as "--". This is the location that you should normally be used for all rooms in your schools primary location. To define additional locations, select Parameters:Locations.

Keep in mind that you may need to define the commuting distance between each possible pair of locations. If you have 5 locations, that means defining up to 10 commuting distances. If you define 20 locations, this means 190 commuting distances! In other words: keep the number of separate locations as small as possible. You may want to base locations on regions or towns, rather than individual addresses.

Once you have defined the necessary locations, the next step is to create the rooms (Parameters:Rooms) that are outside of your schools primary location. One of the fields that you can select for each room is its location. Note that the daily plan displays all rooms in your default location ("--"), whether or not they are used. However, rooms in other locations are only displayed if they are used on that particular day.

Defining commuting time and compensation between locations

Menu item "Parameters : Commuting Times"

After you have defined your locations, you can define the commuting-time and travel-expenses associated with each pair of locations. Any pair for which you do not define the commuting-time and travel-expenses will use the values entered in the commuting options (see above). You enter this information under Parameters:Commuting- Times. Note that you can enter each pair of locations only once - the commuting time is presumed to be the same in both directions.