It’s a major challenge to effectively manage your space, but it is a challenge that is well worth the effort. The individuals listed in this entry are leaders in the field. They have achieved great results with their innovative solutions.
A simple, but effective approach to spreading offering times across the scheduling week is the “zone model.” They key aspect of the zone model is that it divides the week up into zones whereby maximum and minimum usage levels can be enforced on a department-by-department basis. Herb Chereck, University Registrar at the University of Oregon, led his institution in a development effort of an academic scheduling policy that uses such an approach. Herb was part of a panel who presented their policies at a recent AACRAO meeting.
Bruce Cunningham, University Registrar at Duke University, identified enforcement as a key challenge to deploying an effective policy. Duke created a homegrown tool, the departmental schedule validator (DSV), that allows Duke to define and enforce allocation strategies. Specifically, 1) departments are limited to a maximum of 50 percent of their offerings that are held during primetime, and 2) departments are required to keep a relatively even distribution of offerings across approved meeting patterns and days of the week.
John Marshall Law School modeled various academic room renovation plans in our bulk scheduling/optimization tool. Jodie Needham, director of Academic Services, was able to identify the specific renovation plan that most effectively reconfigured their highly constrained downtown Chicago facility to support their specific course offering mix.
Another approach, less common in the United States, but highly effective, is often called timetabling. In this approach, some or all of the course offerings in a schedule are placed in a meeting pattern and room in a single optimization run. Since the offering times are variable within room, instructor, and perceived student availability, this approach typically supports much higher usage levels in a fixed amount of space than pre-assigning meeting patterns.
In my next and last post on space management, I will highlight a few case studies from some of our client institutions that have battled space bottlenecks using the recommended methods that I have described in this series.
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