I'd suggest starting with the schedule from last year and making as few changes as possible. The person in our dept who does the scheduling does this and it works really well. When I first taught. I was given times slots that worked around labs and after was asked if this time worked and we went from there. I know when I am teaching and it doesn't change from one year to the next. Another dept does their's from scratch each year which seems like a waste of time.
Please ask your faculty if the previous year's schedule works before you do that!
We are now going into yr 3 of an absolutely wretched schedule that hurts our enrollment because our previous chair optimized the schedule to suit himself and his buddies (yr 1) and didn't get input from most faculty. Next year same chair ignored our complaints/concerns (required classes conflicted, not enough lab sections, too many similar courses so that many did not make, highly unequal workloads, etc) and submitted the exact same schedule because he waited until the last minute and the dean was literally on the phone demanding it. This year we have an interm chair (from a different program) who didn't bother asking if the schedule worked. He just saw we had the same schedule for two years and sent it in AGAIN. First news we had of our spring schedule was when the student registration opened - one faculty has 16 hrs of courses and another has ZERO - I'm going on my fourth year of teaching 6 days a week - right in the middle of my limited field season -and they want to know why I'm not publishing much anymore!
