Patent ID: 7805107

Claim:
A method of determining and scheduling student demand for courses for a population of students for a future school term comprising: providing to a computer system a student data component for an at least one previous academic term, providing to said computer system a course schedule data component for an at least one previous academic term, determining with said computer system a future student course demand for each of an at least two courses of said course schedule data component to provide a course quantitative demand for each of said at least two courses, determining with said computer system a joint demand for an at least one pair of courses from said course quantitative demand, identifying with said computer system an at least one student sub-population quantity of said student data component, analyzing with said computer system said course quantitative demand and said joint demand by said at least one student sub-population quantity to provide a student sub-population demand, providing to said computer system a set of future students available for a time period to be scheduled in a future academic term to provide a set of available students, applying said student sub-population demand to said set of available students to identify a student sub-population demand of available students for at least one pair of courses and providing a tentative course section demand for a future academic term, and subdividing with said computer system said course quantitative demand to determine a course section quantitative demand for said tentative future academic term by cross-referencing said future student time availability with tentative offering times of course sections in said tentative future course schedule data component to derive a tentative course section demand for a said at least one future academic term.