In late February, 2012, the Brandywine campus held a town hall meeting on instructional space.
They responded to the three questions we have asked at each Town Hall meeting:
- What elements of the current model work?
- What challenges have you encountered with the current scheduling model?
- What should Penn State’s top 5 priorities be?
Brandywine is pleased with the ease of access students have to their recommended academic plans and with the good communication between faculty in the disciplines to avoid scheduling conflicts. They have a standardized block scheduling system with flexibility for late day and evening times.
They articulated difficulties surrounding the conflict between student and faculty needs. Students need regular block times and they need majors to publish schedules in advance, while faculty have preferences for certain days and times. Also, there is not enough flexibility for larger blocks of classes. There also seems to be an issue with the billing date, because students know that if they schedule late, they will be billed later, but this causes a problem with low enrollments for classes, etc.
Here are the priorities they established:
- Determine which disciplines prefer which type of schedule (MWF or TR)
- Take into account audience for each course/discipline (day vs. evening, traditional vs. adult)
- Block classes: consider 8am start with longer class time, consider adjusting the Common Hour (is one a day required?)
- Accommodate different teaching styles (longer classes, web courses)
- Computer labs are often needed occasionally, not every class; could a rotation process work?
Thoughts and comments are welcome.
Thanks to Joanna McGowan, campus registrar, for providing notes from this meeting.