By SHANNON O. WELLS
Although the number of class sections at Pitt hasn’t changed much in the past 10 years, the process for scheduling has become increasingly more complex, a phenomenon Associate Registrar Christopher Coat attributes to factors including physical changes through renovations and changes in weekday scheduling patterns.
Coat shared these and other insights in a presentation at the Faculty Assembly meeting on April 3 in Posvar Hall.
With classroom renovations, such as those taking place in the Cathedral of Learning and other campus buildings, changes in space and design standards come into play.
“Whenever we have these renovations … we see a deduction in the number of seats. And it's not just because the seats are wider. It really has to do with the standards that we have now versus what we've had in the past,” Coat said, using the Cathedral’s second and third-floor classrooms to illustrate his point. “You realize how densely packed those are with desks.
“What we're trying to do is modernize the standard of how much room each student should have,” he added. “So that creates an issue with utilization, when we take away seats in that manner.”
A three-phase renovation to second-floor classrooms in the Cathedral of Learning will soon be underway, which will have a big impact on class scheduling.
“We'll take each of the next three summers to complete,” he said, with the first phase starting next month and running through December. The first phase will close 13 classrooms, predominantly on the Heinz Chapel side of the Cathedral, that are heavily used, Coat said. In addition, two of the Nationality Rooms will be closed.
“You can imagine the impact (that will) continue to have over the course of the next few months,” Coat said, noting that this fall’s schedule is the second hardest he’s had to do in his 10 years here (the hardest was during the pandemic).
Also changing is the level of demand for classrooms on Monday, Wednesday and Friday in favor of more Tuesday-Thursday requests.
“We are seeing a trend in the last few years, actually post COVID, having a much higher number of Tuesday-Thursday sections, not completely rivaling that of Monday-Wednesday-Friday, but becoming close,” Coat explained. “But surprisingly we're seeing more requests for Monday and Wednesday sections as well.”
As policy dictates what classes happen on specific days, Coat said his team and the Learning Space Management Committee want to “make sure that Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are used first because we get more bang for our buck and we get more classes — more sessions in a room per day — if we do that.
“So we have a little bit of a juggling act that we need to do with scheduling,” he added.
Last year, the Office of the Provost and the Office of the University Registrar updated the Learning Space Management Committee, (the former Classroom Management Committee), in an effort to make scheduling more transparent and inclusive while facilitating more efficient use of space and less expense for individual schools.
The committee developed guidelines for utilization of classroom spaces along with clearer definitions of who is responsible for classroom maintenance. After presenting guidelines to deans for their feedback, former Provost Ann Cudd approved them to move forward. Implementation of the new allocation system is now underway.
University Times reported on the new classroom allocation system last fall, which divides rooms between registrar-controlled (99 rooms), department controlled (213) and department priority rooms (84).
The rebranded Learning Space Management Committee raised its profile since spring term 2023 with a page on the provost’s website including direct links for reporting problems in classrooms, a general feedback form, a list of committee members and details of recent projects.
Evaluating space needs
Greg Smith, capital projects and physical resources manager in the provost’s office, reviewed the more recent developments in classroom space reimagination for the Faculty Assembly.
“We do have a new general classroom budgetary and scheduling model (showing) how we use the funds that we are given in the capital budget each year, as well as how those sort of mesh with the scheduling models (we’ve) amended through this committee,” he said, adding that the committee also focuses on classroom technology upgrades. “And with the help of the Center for Teaching and Learning, we have developed a database for those technology upgrades.”
Upgrades are based on a five-year “refresh cycle” that span all educational technologies in classrooms, he noted.
“One thing that we've been able to do is create a base set of standards for our classrooms that our committee uses as we prioritize what rooms need to be addressed … from the physical and technology standpoints,” Smith said.
Those priorities help establish guidelines for Model Three, or departmental-controlled rooms, and “inform us with regards to those rooms and how we interact with those rooms.”
The guidelines also help evaluate needs while providing what Smith called “boots on the ground” via representatives from the registrar's office, Facilities Management and building managers on the space committee.
“We utilize our monthly meetings to take that information and really evaluate and prioritize what rooms really are in need of renovation and what sort of renovations can happen,” he said.
Smaller renovations, including things like seat replacements, are often done between terms. “Some of our larger things oftentimes require the summer (to complete) … and extend into the fall and or spring terms. We try to avoid those as best we can,” he said. “But certainly some renovations require more than a few months.”
Questions on Master Plan, early classes
Carolyn Verga, assistant vice chancellor for campus planning, noted that the 2024-25 Campus Master Plan, a partnership with Sasaki and Associates that’s now in the initial stages, will include input from faculty regarding classroom space in the draft, anticipated to be ready by fall 2025.
Responding to a question about the difference between the Campus Master Plan and the Institutional Master Plan (IMP), Verga explained that the former is “a higher level,” while the IMP is a “legal document that we have to provide by law and it gets a lot deeper into the weeds … If we are looking at the Campus Master Plan and an area of development is identified, then the IMP says this is what the setback needs to be. These are the other things you need. … It gets very detailed and is legally binding.”
The need for a new Master Plan is based on changes including those brought by the COVID pandemic, a new Pitt chancellor, new Strategic Plan and growing enrollment. “Form should follow function,” Verga said. “So if our functions are changing … all of those factors sort of lend themselves into updating the plan.
John Stoner, Educational Policies co-chair, asked about touting the space-efficiency advantages of early-morning classes to faculty and students. Coat responded that while it’s “not an easy paradigm to change here at Pitt,” other institutions, including Penn State, “operate under different policies that allow them maybe a little bit more freedom in how college classrooms are scheduled.”
Noting that the registrar's office is starting to make recommendations regarding scheduling policy changes, Coat floated a hypothetical plan: By utilizing the noon-hour gap for Tuesday-Thursday classes, with classes extending to 5:30 p.m. instead of 5, “or start at 8:30 (a.m.), we actually could get an extra meeting time in there.”
“Technically, we can’t do that. We're bound by that scheduling policy,” he explained, “but those are things that we can do, and I agree that it's a little bit more of a heavy lift.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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