Improving the quality of classroom allocation in higher education | Towards the efficient and effective use of space
Rudy Oude Vrielink is a PhD student in the Department of Industrial Engineering & Business Information Systems. (Co) Promotors are prof.dr.ir. E.W. Hans and prof.dr. J. van Hillegerberg from the Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences.
The academic planning and scheduling process is a complex and vital part of any school year. It involves many stakeholders, including administration, lecturers, students, as well as management and budget holders. The goals of the scheduling process are to bring students and faculty together and to create a balanced curriculum that meets the needs of all stakeholders. In this study, we design various methods to allocate the most appropriate rooms for educational activities that do justice to all stakeholders. We define the performance of timetables and design methods to measure and optimise the room allocations.
Current allocations with timetabling software applications are based on forecasted numbers of students and desired room usage, meaning that if all groups of expected students for all educational activities fit in the available classrooms, the allocations are ready.
However, this research shows that the realised efficiency of these types of allocations is disturbingly low. It also shows that efficiency is not the only relevant indicator. We interviewed lecturers, students, administration, and other stakeholders of scheduling to determine what they consider to be important when allocating rooms for education. The analysis of those interviews shows that the interests of various stakeholders are often not fully considered when allocating rooms. We conclude that current practices are inefficient and that their effectiveness is not measured, and they are even unknown.
Feedback on the actual attendance of students in the planned classrooms is necessary to improve the scheduling process. But next to optimising the allocation of rooms based on both planned and measured attendance, other considerations should also be taken into account, such as searching for the most suited classrooms for the type of lecture and minimising the walking distance for the students and lecturers to the classrooms in order to keep them close to the department. Students and lecturers may not be interested in the efficiency with which rooms are allocated, but they do care about walking distances, a sense of community, and suitable classrooms. Those factors should also be measured and included in the scheduling process.
This research designs new ways of allocating rooms for education. The first way is based on measuring actual attendance in classrooms to enable more dynamic scheduling of rooms. The second way is based on measuring the suitability of rooms for education, for which a new model is constructed to allow the organisation to allocate the best suitable rooms in the schedules. The third and last way is based on the walking distances between classrooms and home bases for the students. Minimising these distances in a specific way can contribute to creating a sense of student communities.
The combination of measuring planned and measured occupation, planned and measured utilisation, the allocation of suitable rooms and the contribution to a sense of community, requires a new governance model for educational institutions. In this research we propose such a governance model with a framework that can be operationalised for individual educational institutions.
The contribution of this research is threefold:
- First, the efficiency of the allocation of rooms for education can improve, even up to 30% in our theoretical model, by using feedback on measured occupation and utilisation in classrooms and rearranging the timetables accordingly. We introduce the concept of dynamic room allocation for education to improve the efficiency of classroom use.
- Second, the effectiveness of the allocation of rooms for education can improve by scheduling either towards minimising walking distances and thus contributing to a sense of student community, or towards allocating suitable rooms for educational activities. This is part of improving the quality of allocations, which can contradict efficiency but might be a valid option for education institutions looking for ways to improve the effectiveness of their support.
- Third, higher education organisations can adapt their support organisation to the changing needs of education. The given model for planning and control of the education organisation can be operationalised for individual organisations to convert the proposed changes into actions.
