University course timetabling is a vital part of any university, directly impacting the engagement and overall learning experience of students (Castineiras et al.). The basic problem involves allocating activities to rooms and timeslots such that no student/lecturer/room is assigned to more than one activity in a given timeslot. The problem is known to be NP-complete which, in simple terms, means it is practically infeasible to solve by brute-force search of all possible allocations.

The problem is further complicated by individual timetabling constraints that vary across institutions, and even across departments within a single institution. In Munster Technological University (MTU) for example, there are various definitions of the problem being solved due to differences in student bodies and resources (e.g. School of Music versus Faculty of Engineering), requiring different software tools due to their specific needs. Many institutions also have room ownership constraints, and therefore cannot be solved in a centralised manner. These restrictions result in rolling over the previous timetable year-to-year, reactively adapting it due to changes in academic staff, student cohort sizes and room infrastructure. In a nutshell, this requires tackling the modelling of the problem as a minimal perturbation problem.

This minimal perturbation approach is also often driven by the short timeframe between all inputs being known and the start of academic year. In particular, the issue is that final cohort sizes are unknown until after Autumn repeat and leaving cert results are released. The latter not only affect allocation for 1st-year cohorts but also have a knock-on impact on the overall solution. However, minimising perturbation year-to-year may also have the untoward effect that, each year, the solution may move further from the initial “good” solution when the timetable was first built from scratch.

Finally, the requirements and preferences of the modern student have changed considerably over the past number of years, with digital enhancements such as hybrid learning being accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, cost-of-living, etc. A separate but equally important concern is sustainability, and the impact of timetabling choices and assumptions as universities aim to move towards green campuses.

Given all these changes, now is an opportune time to revisit the university timetabling problem with fresh eyes and reflect on how these changes could be incorporated. With this in mind, we first sought the perspective of the students on their experiences and preferences with respect to timetabling via a survey with both closed and open -ended questions, with a focus on factors influencing engagement and attendance. Our findings showed that while there are certain commonalities in terms of obstacles to students such as commuting; there were also differences in preferences between science/engineering students and those of the business/humanities offerings in MTU. Further work with Cork School of Music (CSM) illustrated the challenge of generating university-wide timetabling policy. While students of the Science/Engineering/Business departments were mainly in favour of compact schedules (due to commuting, work, etc), students of Arts programmes such as those offered by CSM and those with specific equipment for students, prefer gaps between activities as they get to avail of dedicated on-site facilities.

Together our findings show that the decentralised approach (where departments timetabling somewhat independently), while suboptimal from a room-allocation perspective, is often necessary due to the significant variations in requirements of students across different departments. We discuss the impact this has on the AI tools available for generating solutions to the problem.

Castineiras, I., Grimes, D., & Ozturk, C. (2024, September). Developing a University Timetabling Assistant Tool to Address the Voice of Students. In International Conference on Lean Six Sigma for Higher Education Institutions (pp. 258-266). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

This presentation highlights a new academic partnership that evolved in 2025 between the Faculty of Business in TU Dublin and Humber Polytechnic in Toronto. The Irish and Canadian HE systems face similar challenges in the development of T&L practices and systems. The project's aim is to reimagine how T&L spaces can enact connections, break-down barriers to participation and active learning and to provide students with agency over the spaces they are learning in, both on-and-off campus. The project explores how tools such as digital twins, virtual reality (VR), and collaborative design platforms can support this reimagining of learning space. There are three themes that the collaborative project is investigating over a 16-month timeframe, focusing on how emerging digital tools support cross-institutional collaboration and learning space design:

• What are the technology tools and processes that most effectively support cross-institutional virtual collaboration in scanning, sharing, and re-imagining physical learning spaces?
• How does engaging in cross-institutional virtual teamwork and co-creation of learning experiences translate to developing employability skills/competencies among students?
• What are the resources, training, and costs (both financial-and time-based) required to implement and sustain the digital-twin + sandbox model at scale?

The presentation provides an overview of the project themes, underpinned by a technology-enhanced connected pedagogical framework which seeks to integrate modern design principles with accessible and purposeful technology. The theoretical foundations from which this project arises are social constructivist in nature and predicated on there being complex interplays between the pedagogical intentions of collaborative learning space designs and the student experience ambitions of the cross-institutions that shape the look, feel and function of those spaces (Finkelstein et al., 2016).

From a University-of-Sydney-Business-School learning spaces project, we are cognisant that the size, shapes and technologies within T&L spaces are '...capable of making learning sessions empowering, inspirational, collaborative events or, on the contrary, a stagnant, tedious endurance' (Power & Supple, 2021, p. 91). Therefore, staff development with emerging technologies is a key component. Educator experiences are shared and recorded by means of relevant collaborative tools (e.g. Miro) for project planning and development. International student co-operation is integral to the work with shared, co-created virtual spaces being central to achieving this. We consider the extent to which such virtual spaces offer a genuine sense of ‘presence’ that can complement current physical space provision (Williams et al., 2025).

Such activities, both from a student and an educator/facilitator perspective, are explored in the context of established frameworks (COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning - Rubin, 2017); key characteristics are investigated including; i) international collaboration, ii) curriculum integration (student co-creation will exist as part of assessed coursework, not as an add-on), iii) online interaction, iv) intercultural competence development and v) co-teaching modules. As such, insights will be uncovered both in terms of the capacity for collaborative, experiential, co-creation amongst students but equally in terms of the potential for multi-disciplinary cross-cultural teams to investigate new methodologies towards rapid prototyping.

Working in multi-disciplinary student teams, exploration of different idea-creation pipelines to optimize virtual and physical learning spaces will be disseminated. Bigger questions for institutions of how to scale-up the design and evaluation of such collaborative activities effectively will be discussed along with jointly identifying key success factors towards quantifying the impact on T&L practice for the future. Presenters will reflect on the emerging design principles and decisions and how they worked towards scaffolding capacities of cross-institutional connected learning, with a view to provision of practical guidance for others seeking to implement similar initiatives. Data collection is scheduled with the collaborating students and staff in both institutions to research the impact of the project, across the three themes highlighted.

In a recent article exploring the mirror as metaphor for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education, Angelos Konstatinidis asks ‘what future…we tacitly normalise through the integration’ of AI. In this research paper, we present recent findings on learner experiences of Higher Education, and speculate on possible futures. We argue that through progressively de-placing and de-temporalising HE via ubiquitous technologies such as Learning Management Systems (LMS) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), we risk shaping a ‘non-student’. The paper stems from ongoing research on students’ concepts of time as it relates to learning, study and assessment. The work was conceived primarily in response to the ongoing ‘crisis of engagement’ across the HE sector, which is often linked to increasing financial pressures on students, leading to greater investment of time in paid work and in commuting. However, our research reveals interesting and under-researched learner beliefs concerning educational technology as a substitute for on-campus learning.

Drawing on our analysis of qualitative data collected via survey and through student interviews, and employing the concepts of non-place, non-time, and non-things, we invite reflection on how, in an accelerating present, we might (need to) reclaim the ‘realness’ – spatial, temporal, and relational – of university experience.

To illustrate an emerging paradigm of studenthood which our work has identified, we focus here primarily on the example of the LMS. Particularly of interest is the taken-for-grantedness of the LMS in the learner imaginary: while some learners report eminently advisable uses such as preparation for lectures to enable better in-class focus and engagement, a significant proportion of learners conceive of the LMS as a substitute for or an alternative to attendance at scheduled learning events. While this may be largely a function of external financial pressures, for instance, it reveals a complex vision of the present where activities typically considered fundamental to the occupation of being-a-student become subject to negotiation, optional, and potentially even non-valuable.

We explore the impact on this progressive de-placement and de-temporalisation of Higher Education on student identity, arguing that in the non-place, interaction and relationality are limited, artefacts (essentially non-things) substitute for engagement, and neither relational resonance nor cognitive friction are experienced fully. These barriers to individual and collective academic identity-formation are discussed in light of our students’ trade-offs between presence and absence. In short, we ask if by operating under conditions of transience rather than permanence, and strategic rather than assumed presence, our deployment of educational technologies may be contributing to the emergence of the ‘non-student’.

Through this discussion of present student conceptions of technology in education, we invite colleagues to reflect on how the atomised experience of education lived by the theoretical ‘non-student’ might be challenged, improved, or, indeed, accommodated.