world language laboratory

Community Reservation Calendar

Filed Under Tools

If I had to point to one thing that is really making my job as a Lab Coordinator easier to manage it’s this open source reservation calendar. You can see ours here and a demo of the latest version here (we haven’t updated yet, but we will). As you can see from the release history, the Meeting Room Booking System (MRBS) has been in development since 2000, with major improvements dropping regularly since 2004.

It may not be as colorful as Google calendars, but it’s a central, standalone webapp where all twenty of us can make reservations for different areas of the lab, thereby maximizing our use of the space. LDAP authentication means that faculty can use the same login and password for this calendar as they do for their webmail and that one teacher can’t accidentally delete another teacher’s reservation (only I can edit other people’s entries as Admin).

The only downside is that reservations are rounded to the nearest half hour, fifteen minutes, or five minutes, whatever time interval you decide on. So if you wanted to make reservations to the nearest five minutes you’d end up with a ton of rows going down the screen (96 rows for an eight hour day to be exact). We compromised by setting fifteen minute intervals throughout the day and then asking teachers to type in the exact time of their reservation (their class period) in the reservation title. A reservation from yesterday, for example, appears to go from 12:00 - 1:00 PM but the teacher has clarified in the title that it’s really from 12:15 to 12:55 PM.

Later versions of the calendar allow you to set up periods, so if you have a set time schedule you can make it even easier on people, as this demo shows. Here at Lab that wouldn’t work, since the World Language Lab is used by students in the Lower School, Middle School, and High School, all of which have different daily schedules.

I suppose to appreciate this open source project, you’d have to understand the alternatives. One alternative would be a paper solution, which would be a waste of trees and a big pain since the teachers are all over the school all day and do not all have offices in a central location. The other alternative would be an email solution, which would cause me no end of problems trying to give the right faculty priority when two teachers wanted the same time slot. This way, faculty work out the time conflicts themselves and it’s always clear who is coming in when. Major administrative time savings.

Teachers use the third column, called the TRAINING AREA, to reserve time with me for professional training. As long as my schedule shows availability, they don’t have to ask, “are you free during such and such period?” They just make the appointment and come in. Simple.

The world turns on small hinges and I for one am very grateful to the developers who volunteered their time and talents to design a reservation calendar that just works. Thank you, John Beranek & Co.