Meeting of the Academic Chairs & Directors
December 1, 2008 Room 101 – Bloch School Attendance sign-in sheet attached
Chair Kathleen Kilway welcomed the group, led introductions and stated that the agenda today is to focus
on understanding the challenges and solutions with regard to classroom utilization and class scheduling.
Registrar Doug Swink gave the following PowerPoint presentation:
Slide 1: Classroom Scheduling Challenges
 High demand of ILE rooms
 High demand of particular class times
 TR 9:30 and 11
 evening classes at 5:30
 Classes scheduled MW for 75 minutes, instead of MWF for 50 minutes, thus restricting the
availability of room
 Only 29% of classrooms on campus are “Centrally Scheduled”; with another 12% of classrooms
available for Central use after the Academic Unit gets first priority.
 Example:
 Fall 2008, still had 30 classes without classrooms the Friday before classes started.
 Had been working on finding rooms for these classes for a month.
 A&S “found” unit-owned space for these classes.
 Classes that are scheduled in 50 minute time blocks allow for 10 minutes spacing. If a class is
scheduled in 75 minutes increments, we lose 40 minutes in the meeting patterns for that classroom
Slide 2: AAIS Capacity Study Findings
 Overall classroom utilization is moderately low.
 Utilization of certain room types is high.
 ILE Classrooms are 72% utilized
 Regular classrooms are 50% utilized
 Utilization of classrooms and ILE-classrooms varies by department.
 AAIS = Ad Astra Information Systems
 Walked all rooms on Volker campus … nothing has been analyzed at Hospital Hill yet.
 Took Fall 2005 data – factored out cross-listed classes and other duplications
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Slide 3: AAIS Capacity Study Findings, continued
 Utilization of classrooms varies by size
 Most used sizes: 41-60 seats, 61-80 seats, 150+ seats
 Least used sizes: 1-15 seats, 16-25 seats
 this could be because fewer of the smaller rooms have ILE capabilities vs. actual
need for these rooms being less
 Every size category of ILE Classrooms has a bottleneck
On average, seat fill ratio is less than 60% based on actual enrollment
• There have been times in the past where units have increased maximum capacity to obtain a large
ILE room.
• We try and monitor these situation to keep rooms capacities and enrollment in balance
• 60 ratio is based on maximum enrollment compared to actual enrollment in a class
____________________________________________________________________________________
Slide 4: AAIS Capacity Study Findings, continued
 UMKC has bottlenecks during prime scheduling times and evenings
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

AAIS identified MTWR 9 am -3 pm and 5:30-8:30 pm as bottlenecks in ILE-Classrooms
Anecdotally, we know that bottlenecks occur at: TR 9:30-10:45, TR 12:30-1:45, MTWR after
5:30
 It is difficult to identify all of the bottlenecks, because rooms are scheduled based on room
availability vs. most appropriate classroom fit.
 What is a bottleneck?
A bottleneck can be described as a room that is used over 80% of the time.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Slide 5: AAIS Capacity Study Recommendations
 Develop an academic scheduling policy that maximizes room utilization.
 Spread utilization across the 79-hour standard scheduling week
 Adhere to an allocation policy for ILE-classrooms by department
 Assign classrooms based on a best fit ratio between the enrollment (or max enrollment)
and the room’s capacity
Current policy was developed in Partnership with the Provost’s office in 2004
• Standard meeting patterns, get back to the 50 min meeting pattern vs. the 75 min meeting pattern
• Spreading out class offerings through the day/week.
At this time we do not have an ILE class room policy established
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Slide 6: Fall 2008 Scheduling
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
7:00 AM
1
1
1
8:00 AM
43
52
40
9:00 AM
91
119
10:00 AM
106
11:00 AM
Friday
Grand Total
2
5
43
44
222
96
109
78
493
120
110
112
81
529
104
107
103
100
84
498
12:00 PM
104
156
106
159
69
594
1:00 PM
97
114
98
113
69
491
2:00 PM
120
111
121
101
61
514
3:00 PM
113
120
118
117
44
512
4:00 PM
104
113
100
103
33
453
5:00 PM
132
134
139
136
7
548
6:00 PM
122
126
143
118
13
522
7:00 PM
97
93
98
77
13
378
8:00 PM
76
60
65
45
11
257
9:00 PM
43
31
25
23
11
133
Grand Total
1354
1457
1364
Thursday
1357
621
6153
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_____________________________________________________________________________________
Slide 7: AAIS Capacity Study Recommendations
 Scrutinize the inventory of space and review existing class section scheduling data
 Some changes have impacted the classroom space on campus since this data was analyzed:
 Pharmacy moving to Hospital Hill in Fall 2007
 Classrooms being removed from the inventory for office space
 Campus Facilities Management has been reviewing the entire room inventory and reevaluating the space to adjust classroom capacities to be in compliance with new standards
for fire safety.
 Remember there have been changes with Pharmacy moving to Hospital hill since this study was
done. And changes are always taking place with classrooms being removed
 Campus Facilities Management – Has not implemented the room capacity changes yet. They
understand the hardship this will place on our ability to schedule classes in centrally scheduled
rooms.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Slide 8: Volker Campus Room Inventory
Fall 2005 Fall 2008
ILE Classrooms
Priority Scheduling, then Central
ILE Classrooms
Central Scheduling
19
20
29
34
Total ILE Classrooms
48
54
Other Classrooms/Labs
Central Scheduling
29
24
Other Classrooms/Labs
Priority Scheduling, then Central
8
5
Other Classrooms/Labs
Unit Owned
115
120
Total Other Classrooms
152
149
Total Rooms
200
203
ILE Classrooms have increased; but “other” classrooms have decreased
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Slide 9: Specific actions recommended by AAIS
 Allow Registration & Records office to schedule ALL classrooms on campus in partnership with
academic units
 Adhere to Standard Meeting Patterns
 Distribute class offerings evenly throughout the day and week
 R&R office utilize AdAstra optimizer for quick, efficient, unbiased classroom scheduling
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 Academic Units utilize AdAstra for ad-hoc meeting/event scheduling
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Slide 10: Academic Planning
 Phase 1: Scheduling software
Immediate implementation possible
 Automatic classroom assignment
 Ability to preference specific types of rooms or buildings
 Optimize classroom size with class enrollment
 Quicker, more efficient, unbiased Schedule of Classes preparation
 Phase 2: Four-year road map / Degree audit (DARS)
Spring 2009 implementation possible
 Partner with AAIS to conduct another capacity study & implement Ad Astra 7.0
 Phase 3: Integration with degree audit
Future implementation possible
 Forecast course demand for upcoming terms
Phase 1, was started this year with testing the optimizer
How it works
• Place courses in rooms with building preferences by subjects (e.g. education in the School of
Education building or A&S classes in the quad)
• Gives preferences to ILE rooms followed by regular classrooms and seminar rooms
• Looks at maximum enrollments on courses and finds the best fit automatically
• Labs are never optimized
• Best fit between max capacity and room capacity
• Less manual intervention by departments and registration and records
Question/Answer session
Q: What is the definition of “utilize”?
A: Fill rate is a percentage of room capacity to actual seats filled; the number of non-scheduled to
scheduled rooms. Utilization data is taken on the 20th day of classes, not the first.
Q: What does “unbiased classroom scheduling” mean?
A: Unbiased means that no department would be intentionally scheduled first. The Registrar’s office would
also work with each department on exceptional needs.
Q: What are the class parameters of the optimizer?
A: It uses standard meeting parameters – a preference for 50 minute meetings MWF
Follow-up: What about Master’s programs that require 3-hour blocks of time? How can we respond to
commuting non-resident students? This seems biased toward undergraduate classes.
A: The optimizer can be customized and we need to update the Schedule of Classes Policies & Procedures,
which has not been addressed since 2004.
Schedule of Classes Policies & Procedures: http://www.umkc.edu/registrar/scheduling.asp
Q: How do our utilization numbers compare to other universities?
A: Do not have data, will look into this.
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Provost Hackett:
UMKC is very low on centrally scheduled classrooms. However, there are too many complex issues to
simply turn it all over to central scheduling. The solution is to work together. Ad Astra may be part of our
solution but not all of it.
Q: Double-booking is a serious problem. Is anything being done to address it?
A: There have been two methods of scheduling – paper books and Ad Astra/PeopleSoft software. The
Registrar’s office has asked that the paper books be eliminated. Communication will be facilitated by the
scheduling website where there is a list of schedulers you can contact, plus important dates.
http://www.umkc.edu/registrar/scheduling.asp
Q: Scheduling should be more flexible – Say you schedule a room for a class of 50 but only 20 sign up, it has
been impossible to be quickly re-assigned to a smaller room.
A: The optimizer will automatically re-assign rooms according to the final number of students. We can also
run a report at any point in time to reveal these situations.
Q: Are any more ILE classrooms planned?
A: (CIO Mary Lou Hines-Fritts) Twenty or more traditional ILE classrooms, size 15 or more, will be added.
Also, 60 additional rooms will be upgraded to “partial” or “hybrid” ILE status by June of 2009. Work on this
will begin in the Spring semester. “Partial” or “hybrid” ILE includes everything but the document camera,
and the rooms will be wired for it now so that it can be added later. This will cost $600,000 - funded by IS.
Campus-wide workstation lifecycle replacement plans will have to be reviewed. Audio/video broadcast
software called TEGRITY is being piloted that could increase usage of the Northland campus space.
Q: What can be done to efficiently utilize time on Fridays?
A: Classes that meet 2 times a week could meet either on Monday and Friday or Wednesday and Friday as
well as Monday and Wednesday. Three-hour classes could meet on Friday, or a class could have two
meetings on Friday. A class could meet on Monday and Wednesday and have an online class on Friday.
Provost Hackett:
At the present time, 60% of classes at UMKC meet between 10:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. This is not studentcentered scheduling. We can no longer support a bias toward faculty convenience in our scheduling.
Q: It seems that the new budget model will create an atmosphere where units will protect their large
classrooms in order to ensure space to grow their enrollment. What can be done about that?
Provost Hackett: We are going to need more large classrooms. We have a large percentage of small classes
and could see a financial gain by combining sections in a few instances if we had the space. There will be
one new large classroom in the library expansion which will be centrally scheduled, not controlled by one
unit. We will include plans for large classrooms in each construction or renovation project going forward.
Q: Continuing Education classes that have been held at off-campus venues in South Kansas City are harder
to schedule because companies are experiencing security issues and are less willing to offer space for our
use. We need a South KC campus like the Northland one.
A: One suggestion is to explore the use of the high schools. Another suggestion is that the Metropolitan
Community College has an empty building that they would be happy to rent.
Q: How do we arrange for handicapped-accessible classroom space?
A: Notify Scott Laurent in Disability services. This should be done on a pro-active basis.
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Q: How can we entice students to enroll earlier?
A: Jennifer DeHaemers: The fee for late enrollment is $35.00. Some universities charge $300-$400.
Perhaps a solution is to have a graduated fee rate by time. Will research this and discuss.
Spring 2009 Enrollment Guide:
http://www.umkc.edu/registrar/forms/Spring%202009%20Registration%20and%20Enrollment%20Guide.p
df
Provost Hackett:
We are working on creating major-maps. By the end of this semester we should have a road map for every
major in a common template that can interface with DARS and scheduling software. The resulting data can
be used to predict the number of seats needed in what courses. Classroom size can then be planned in the
proper size for enrollment projections.
We will face continuing challenges as we grow enrollment. We must continue to communicate and share
ideas.
Chair Kilway requested input from the group on subjects and presenters for future meetings.
Meeting adjourned.
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