By SUSAN JONES
The Office of the Provost and with the Office of the University Registrar have updated the Learning Space Management Committee, formerly the Classroom Management Committee, to make it more transparent and inclusive, and in January will begin to implement a new classroom allocation system that hopefully will lead to more efficient use of space and less expense for individual schools.
Associate University Registrar Christopher Coat told the Senate Campus Utilization and Public Safety committee on Sept. 12 that former Provost Ann Cudd charged the Classroom Management Committee to look at what it does and how that could be improved.
The rebranded Learning Space Management Committee has been trying to raise its profile since last school term. A new webpage on the provost’s website has direct links to Pitt IT, Facilities Management and the Teacher Center to report problems in classrooms, as well as a general feedback form. It also lists the committee’s members and details some recent projects. Coat said there are now signs in several classrooms encouraging people to report problems.
The committee also has recently added a faculty member and is looking for a student to participate. “We feel that is an area that maybe in the past this committee has not engaged with as well as we should have,” said Greg Smith, a member of the Learning Space Management Committee and capital projects and physical resources manager in the Office of the Provost. “And our effort and our commitment of this new rechartered committee is that we want to be more transparent with those constituents.”
But the committee’s major project for the past year has been developing guidelines for the proper utilization of classroom spaces and some clear definitions of who’s responsible for maintenance of classrooms. Cudd presented the guidelines to the deans for suggestions before she approved them to move forward.
Classrooms are currently assigned under three models:
Model 1 (99 rooms): These spaces, which include the 30 Nationality Rooms, are controlled by the registrar’s office. All renovation and maintenance costs are handled by the Learning Space Management Committee.
Model 2 (84 rooms): These are department priority rooms, which are available for specific departments or schools to schedule up until a certain date, when they revert to the registrar’s office. Right now, costs for these rooms are split between the individual unit and the Learning Space Management Committee.
Model 3 (213 rooms): These are controlled by and the costs are assumed by individual departments and schools. Coat said one of the things they came across while researching the new guidelines is that many times the schools or departments don’t have a sense of minimum standards in classrooms for media, technology, seating and more. “So part of these guidelines are to try to establish those standards.” The departmental rooms also sometimes don’t follow standard meeting times, which lead to inefficiencies.
“The departmental priority rooms (Model 2), we were getting questions from schools and departments about renovating or maintaining them to a certain standard,” Smith said. “It felt like it was seemingly a case by case basis as to what the committee in particular would fund. … How much would we fund? Would we fund half of it, would fund all of it, would we fund none of it? And there were just no clear guidelines.”
New guidelines
Under the new plan, the Model 2 departmental priority rooms will see the biggest changes.
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Academic units will no longer preschedule these rooms, however preference will be given to the units when rooms are assigned by the registrar.
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Room maintenance, renovation and technology costs will be paid for by the Learning Space Management Committee, which also will make sure the rooms meet at least the minimum standards for space, accessibility and technology.
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The room’s square footage will be counted toward the academic unit’s budget, under the new university-wide budget model.
The change in the way these rooms are scheduled will begin in summer 2024, although Smith said the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences agreed to have its Model 2 rooms scheduled under the new guidelines for spring 2024. But the change in who funds updates to the rooms will begin in January 2024.
“It didn’t seem logical for the registrar’s office to not have some level of scheduling control (over departmental priority rooms),” Smith said. By letting the departments schedule the rooms first and then having the registrar’s office “backfill” them, “we were finding that was leading to poor utilization rates and poor efficiency rates.”
Coat said there were several reasons these changes were needed. Although the number of class sections has remained unchanged, all the classrooms that have been renovated have fewer seats because of new standards of about 26 square feet per student.
“If you, for example, go to the second floor Cathedral classrooms, those seats are pushed in there as if they were a storage room rather than a classroom,” Coat said. “It is difficult for students to get in and out, let alone have any type of active learning situation. … Second floor classrooms in the Cathedral are approaching single digits as far as the square footage per student in some of those spaces, so 26 is quite a far way off.”
Conversely, the classrooms on the ground floor of the Cathedral that have been renovated have seating that is much more generous. When they change the seating from desks to tables, Coat said, that can decrease capacity by a third.
“With every one of these renovation projects, we’re actually seeing a decrease in capacity,” he said. “And while it doesn’t seem that taking away a quarter of the seats would matter, it really does. It starts depleting our total inventory of where we can place classes of certain sizes.”
The number of classrooms available also is often in flux. For instance, a recent renovation in Langley Hall took two rooms with a capacity of 100 each and combined them into one room that can hold 145. The change gives the instructors more room to move around and makes the room more adaptable to different learning settings.
The Langley Hall rooms also were among the first to be renovated under the new guidelines, with the Learning Space Management Committee picking up the cost of that. The two departments who regularly used these rooms — bioscience and neuroscience — will still be the primary users, but the registrar’s office also can try to bring the utilization of the room up by scheduling classes at off-peak times, for instance, Smith said.
Classroom utilization
The other part of the new classroom policy is about room utilization, whether for classes or for other departmental events.
“We know that there are some rooms on campus that are very poorly utilized — single digit utilization,” Coat said. “What the policy has basically said is we want to make sure that these departmental rooms (Model 3) are being utilized, whether it’s classes or for events. We don’t want them sitting empty. In other words, we don’t want to have one meeting a month or one meeting a term that are prohibiting the scheduling of classes. It’d be much better to have a class there instead of having a class go up to Scaife (Hall).”
Irene Frieze, an emeritus professor of psychology, said she has heard there are five psychology classes this semester at Scaife Hall, which is difficult for faculty and students who might have to move quickly from Scaife to the Cathedral for their next class.
Under the new policy, academic units that schedule Model 3 learning spaces must achieve 66 percent room utilization — either classes or other events — measured across the fall and spring terms. If the rooms are underutilized, they will be reclassified as a Model 1 or 2 learning space.
Going forward, the registrar’s office will be gathering utilization data and sending it to the departments, “so that they are fully aware of what’s going on there. But we want to open up more of a dialogue between the provost’s office and the schools about utilization of those spaces.”
Committee member Viktoria Harms, a teaching associate professor in the German department, pointed out, “Sometimes it sounds like faculty is being blamed for always wanting to teach at certain times and arranging their schedule in a way that’s convenient to us. I have to say, we also think about the students. For example, if I offered a class at eight o’clock in the morning, nobody would show up. Even at 10, they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s so early.’ So it’s not just us, it’s also convincing the students.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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