Guests: Marcia Roberts, Amy Cole

March 15, 2011

Members present: Doug Swink, Kathy Garrison, Shelly Janasz, Judy Jellison, Chris Jordan, Tina Melville, Helen Perry, Thomas Sandreczki, Gail Metcalf-Schartel, Stella Szymanski,

Agenda items:

1. Classroom discussion with Marcia Roberts, Scheduling Coordinator

Marcia is here to discuss the scheduling process, its challenges, how she is meeting needs and managing the available space. Certain times are very popular, M-Th at 5:30 is now completely full, 9:30 – 2:30 Tu/Th are full, MW mornings are full. She has seen the impact of the enrollment increase and how space had to be utilized better. Departments are caps adjusting both up and down to fit rooms better, creating larger sections, increasing nighttime classes. PACE nighttime classes have been filled to capacity. Larger rooms such as Royal 111 are booked solid. Creating a long one-evening class does have an impact on scheduling, taking up 2 slots, so it helps to have it matched with another one-day class (Mon and Wed). Early morning classes, 7 or 8 am are options for scheduling although students do tend to drop those classes. Afternoons at 3:30 - 4:45 are open. Have been reading reports on schools that have handled their increases in attendance by scheduling classes much later in the evening.

Are Law school rooms available in the evening? They are although Bloch gets first choice.

Bloch is at full capacity with renovations.

Nursing is scheduling early morning classes.

With a goal of 16,500 students we just will need physically more rooms. The library expansion should help with that. By 2013 will have another 900 seats. Doug will ask Bob Simmons to come to a meeting to discuss the expansion and campus plans.

Can’t even know how many students we’ve lost because they weren’t able to get the classes they needed. Ad Astra and Andrew Draker are developing enrollment management tools and reports that expand class roster information to units. They’ll be able to look at historical trends and chairs, departments and schedulers will be able to better gauge needs. Especially helpful for orientation, knowing that we need this many seats, have this many nursing students coming, etc. Also able to review the issues related to dropping.

Marcia runs the optimizer to get efficient use of rooms, but still receives many calls for exceptions and special requests. She will try to adjust the schedule when possible but she does require the instructors to step back and follow the process by going through their schedulers.

Marcia will be going over the seating changes with Karen Lavendusky. Room caps will be reviewed starting with summer. One policy that has no exception: no rooms are available during finals week.

Also the schedule is very interdependent within departments and across programs, labs not meeting when the lecture is, a chemistry gen ed not meeting when biology and nursing students have to take a different required course.

There’s been a change that rooms are scheduled fairly late now? Better able to check enrollment, fewer changes seen by students. The schedule is very dynamic, classes change, are cancelled, etc. Instructors see that the first week of classes, overfull first week, adjust themselves by the next.

Do need to enforce policies to assist in handling and maximizing space. We have to use what we have in place presently, hope to have new policies in by 2012.

2. Student Scheduling Survey Follow-up

Seems like the number of employed students was too low. In Engineering 60% of our students are working PT and 17% have paid internships.

Perhaps it would be helpful to send out another, shorter survey. When was this compiled? Feb. 2010.

According the survey the employed students want to come 2 times a week and are not interested in Fridays or weekends.

That doesn’t mesh with what the employed students in AUPD want, they do come in the evenings or early in the morning.

3. Review Room File Updates

Still many corrections and non-classrooms on the room file. Amy Marcia and Doug will make adjustments.

4. Review Exceptions

Goal is to determine what space we have and what we can to do to use that space better; develop common grounds and guidelines.

Review document that lists exceptions per unit: College of Arts & Sciences: Naturally, specialized rooms are restricted from central scheduling: labs, computer rooms, GIS, theaters. Five hour classes (like foreign language) are a scheduling difficulty but can’t be helped.

There are seminar rooms within departments that may be available to be used by central scheduling. May need persuasion by Provost’s Office to open them up.

Have increased three day a week classes. Friday is less of an issue for the College; overall is Friday a faculty issue or a student issue? If it’s a problem, drop MW as an option, but do need to be flexible and listen to students concerns. Can be difficult to mesh programs.

Things to consider to lessen scheduling difficulties: Blended classes, developing and communicating to pair one day a week classes. Parking incentive for instructors. Allow departmental rooms as primetime backups. Use a 2 tier system, general ed, lecture classes strictly follow the 3 day a week policy.

May be turning students away when the General Sciences fill up, may look at Saturday labs.

Conservatory: Generally work within current scheduling guidelines so that students will be able to take classes in other programs.

We don’t have that many general classrooms, most are small with removable chairs.

Computing and Engineering: Unit has a majority of specialized class and classrooms. Use outside experts for instructors so have to work with their schedules. The majority of students already at upper levels and working. Students have to take a shop safety class at MCCC that’s offered on Friday afternoons. One common conflict: the semester our students take CE 110 it conflicts with physics and calculus courses.

Education: Doctoral program consists of 3 hour blocks during the day for internships. Sometimes have to synch-up schedule with the local K-12 school schedule. Have 3 hour blocks during the day but are trying to actually schedule at the schools. For physical education classes, Swinney handles the scheduling.

Law School: Have back-to-back intensive classroom use. Also needed for other activities such as: competition rehearsals, brief preparation, etc.

Nursing: Have been fairly successful in scheduling Fridays. One problem has been the clinicals that students have at sophomore level. One way to ease scheduling was to require students to take summer classes. It has also been helpful that the PoliSci and Philosophy departments have developed online versions of the courses that our students regularly take. In future may work with A&S to schedule MWSat sections for gen eds with labs.

Pharmacy: Have been working to utilize space as efficiently as possible. Use Friday for 5-, 7- credit hour courses. From 1 – 5 in the afternoon we have rotations but that doesn’t take a room. Biology seminar course is the only one that really doesn’t fall within the scheduling guidelines. Also have to work with scheduling in Columbia for satellite program. We, like Engineering, have a specialized outside faculty and most work with their schedules.

General: May be helpful to develop blended courses where the students go online for the lecture and are in class for the lab. Develop some kind of incentive to create online courses. Issues that need to be addressed when developing online courses: retention issues, at-risk students. Some student populations already have a system of over-site in place such as the student athletes, perhaps they can be used as models.

5. Action Items for Next Meeting

Go over Bloch exceptions next time.

If you have any more, please submit room changes and exceptions to Lisa

Doug, Amy and Marcia will go over room survey.

Review the old policy and be prepared with ideas for a new draft policy.

Next meeting: Tuesday, March 29, Gillham Park room