The Usefulness of Dynamic Programming in Course Allocation in the Nigerian Universities

Abstract

Having lectured in some universities and polytechnics in Nigeria, the researchers observed problems in course allocations. There are no lay-down techniques on how courses should be allocated with respect to the minimum and maximum credit a lecturer should carry in a semester. Many lecturers were overloaded while others were under-loaded. For this reason, dynamic programming model was developed for allocating courses among lecturers in the Nigerian universities using the Department of Statistics, Federal University of Technology Owerri, as a case study. From our analysis, we observed that among all the optimal allocations discovered in the study, the best optimal allocation policy was achieved at the point (1, 2, 1, 2). Allocation of courses in this order will yield an optimal credit hour of 12 per lecturer per semester.