In this, the final post in this series on bottlenecks and their impact on campus capacity, I’ll highlight some examples of the successful use of our approach. The important thing to note is that only the framework is consistent across these institutions. The actual allocation strategies and formalized scheduling policies are derived from an analysis of each institution’s unique challenges. Additionally, this framework assumes that the statistical analysis used to attack their bottlenecks will need to be rerun over time to address new bottlenecks and resulting changes to strategies and policies to attack them.

 

University of British Columbia:

Reports from UBC’s bottleneck study (our first study of this type) showed that their primary scheduling issue was large-capacity rooms being booked by low-enrollment sections. Interestingly, the concentration of scheduling during primetime for these rooms was a virtual non-issue (since the demand for large rooms had already pushed heavy usage outside of primetime hours). Since the study, UBC has shown the need to require that their academic departments have at least a 70 percent fill rate in large classrooms. To the surprise of their central scheduling office staff, the reports from the study convinced their departments to unanimously approve this standard with little discussion.  UBC is now considering other recommendations from the study to support continued growth without new construction.

 

California State University Long Beach:

CSULB had a long-standing bottleneck in their large capacity lecture rooms, some of which were coming on and offline for renovation. CSULB had already – out of necessity – developed allocation strategies for their much sought-after lecture theatres. Therefore, the focus of their study was to refine their allocation strategies by developing reports to document their space constraints and enforce strategies. These reports are now being used to manage their updated academic scheduling policy, which includes the four identified scheduling strategies from the study. This effort, which started with the Fall 2007 class schedule, has already yielded impressive results. Deviations from the approved meeting time matrix have decreased 40% and the combined efficiencies from bottleneck allocation strategies led to 43% fewer classes left unscheduled by the departments.

 

University of Missouri—Kansas City:

UMKC’s bottlenecks were its technology-enhanced classrooms. The bottleneck study showed a wide range of usage levels of bottlenecks from each department. For example, one department was scheduling 80 percent of its offerings into these classrooms, even though many offerings did not require the technology. To equitably use the rooms and allow for goal enrollment growth, our study showed that UMKC could create and enforce a policy where each department could schedule only 40 percent of its lecture sections in the enhanced rooms. Discussions between the Registrar’s office and Provosts office are now focused on formalizing an academic policy that will ensure strategic enrollment growth potential and equity between departments.

 

Pacific Graduate School of Psychology:

PGSP offered many courses that were scheduled in non-standard meeting patterns. For example, one-hour meetings that started and ended “off the grid” were conflicting with two standard one-hour blocks (not just one), making it harder to build conflict-free schedules for PGSP students, faculty and classrooms. Since standard meeting patterns allow better fit and utilization of scheduled space, our bottleneck study urged PGSP to reevaluate its meeting patterns to make them more standard. Additionally, a PGSP survey was incorporated into the study showing potential changes to afternoon and evening timeslots that might increase student availability to certain courses.

 

Johnson County Community College:

JCCC has primetime scheduling periods in the day and evening, when small and mid-sized classrooms (16-25 and 26-40 seat categories) were very hard to find. In the short term, a well timed construction project adds several of these prime rooms. To continue to support their steady enrollment growth, however, JCCC plans to use the study’s reports to monitor primetime/non-primetime scheduling ratios by departments and the impact of departmentally controlled classrooms.

 

 

As I bring this topic to a close, I hope that reading about space management and other institutions’ success stories will inspire you to attack bottleneck challenges on your own campus. Your comments and questions about this topic are always welcomed and encouraged. Please contact me at tshaver@astraschedule.com.

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