October 28, 2010
Scheduling classrooms: Balancing multiple needs for ‘a miracle’ every quarter
The UW has thousands of class sections filling hundreds of rooms every day, all quarter, all year. How are all those lecture and lab classes scheduled?
“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle for us,” said Matthew Winslow, acting associate registrar in the Room Assignment and Time Schedule Office. “Or sort of like Tetris, where you’ve got to get these blocks to fill in all the gaps.”
Except, of course, it’s on a huge scale: There are more than 5,800 sections on upper campus this fall, filling about 310 rooms. And like the steady torrent of odd-shaped blocks in Tetris, they just keep on coming.
Every quarter, Winslow’s office juggles factors of time, day, location and more to match classes and rooms with the least amount of faculty inconvenience and wasted time and space. They are assisted by the Classroom Support Services Office, which sees to classroom technical needs and longer-range planning.
The scheduling process begins locally; department course coordinators submit schedules to the Time Schedule Office up to nine months before a quarter starts, Winslow said. “They’ve got to juggle a lot of different competing needs from within their departments and distill that into something we can work with,” Winslow said. “I don’t envy their jobs and they say the same thing about me.”
With room assignment software that maximizes use of space, better than nine in 10 classes are scheduled smoothly from the start: “Somewhere between 93 and 95 percent of all the sections we get right up front,” Winslow said.
“Then those remaining 5 to 7 percent, that becomes where things get tricky. Those are the puzzle pieces we’ve got to start moving around in order to make room for these others to fit in.”
Outfitting the rooms with the technical needs of the class is the work of the Classroom Support Services Office. Director Roberta Hopkins said, “The scheduling happens at the registrar’s office but we work closely with them on planning for classrooms and looking at future needs … What kind of rooms do we want in our new buildings? What is the right size, the right furniture to put in classrooms?” The office can provide laptops and portable video data projectors that faculty members can check out for the quarter if they’re assigned to a room that isn’t sufficiently wired.
Many of the 3 to 7 percent of class sections remaining after the room assignment software, Winslow said, can be solved by just modifying the search a little.
Departments rank buildings in terms of preference for their classes, Winslow said. “Sometimes departments will say, ‘We like this building,’ but then forget to have the building next to that in their rankings. So we might be able to find them a space by just pushing out a little further than what they have defined.”
The Time Schedule Office, Winslow said, cannot compel anyone to teach at a certain time or place. “Maybe make compelling arguments. But it’s up to them.”
Disputed claims over classroom space are usually resolved with a little communication. But there are rare times when even deans get involved. “They will tell us why this particular class has to be on the schedule and most of the time — the vast majority of the time — we are able to find some resolution where it doesn’t keep everybody perfectly happy but it does meet the needs of the University.”
It’s true, too, that some class scheduling leaves faculty with little time to cross the campus and prepare their classroom, especially if there are technical needs to be addressed. But at least it’s not personal, it’s just the software. “Our assignments are agnostic to the person,” Winslow said. “We don’t import instructor information into our database, and even if we did, the scheduling algorithm doesn’t use that as a feature.”
If there’s any particular trend these days in classroom scheduling, it’s that driven by budget cuts, and trying to do more with less. “What we’re seeing right now is a move toward having larger classes,” Winslow said, “so the departments can meet the needs of students while at the same time meeting the budget restrictions that we’re under.”
Small classes are getting large and large classes are getting even bigger. Winslow said between 2009 and 2010, classes of 150 or more increased by 13 percent and those of 200 or more students increased by almost 20 percent. That classes 250 and up dropped by 18 percent in that same time has more to do with “limited inventory,” he said. “You can’t get any more classes into our large rooms — they’re packed out.” Hopkins of Classroom Support Services agreed, saying, “The pressure on those big rooms is getting extreme.”
Condon Hall is the campus overflow building when it comes to office and class scheduling. When Savery Hall underwent its renovation, many of its resident faculty moved to Condon, and displaced HUB offices are there for the next couple of years.
One way of moving the process along better would be to get the biggest classes scheduled earlier, Hopkins said. “One of the things we’ve been talking about in the central administration is asking departments to pre-schedule some of their large courses, so we can get those settled.” Departments would then cluster their other classes around the big classes.
Winslow agreed: “Get the big ones scheduled first, and once the departments know that, they can adjust the rest of their schedules and not have to worry about losing rooms, because there haven’t been any rooms assigned yet.”
Each quarter is a unique event — “for good and bad” — in classroom scheduling, Winslow said — a jigsaw puzzle cut anew, awaiting assembly.
And though it can be a difficult process, departments tend to cooperate as needed to make it all work. “One of the things I really appreciate about the University is that, even given our size, people from the different units are always trying to work with each other,” he said. “And they will try to see what they can do to accommodate us.”
He added, “Every quarter it seems like I’m not going to make it, then somehow we do. It’s like, we pull off a miracle every quarter.”
And then the great Tetris game sends more blocks in the form of next quarter’s classes — and it all begins again.
