Education Space Consultancy

Providing expert timetable and space management consultancy services within the education sector

Understanding Where You Are Now In Order To Get Where You Need To Be

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For most if not all institutions there is a strive to improve upon what already exists in order to make the most out of available resources and provide students with a continually improving education and experience. Timetabling is no exception, with a continual push to provide an improved timetable experience for staff and students as well as an improved teaching space (and time) utilisation rate.

It is no longer good enough just to provide a timetable that works – although this in itself can in some cases be nightmarishly hard as it is – a timetable must now factor in other constraints as well in order to compete with student expectations, such as maximum teaching days, maximum break between lectures, lunch breaks, research days (amongst many other possible constraints) whilst also maximising the utilisation of the teaching space and time available in order to minimise costs. This rapid increase in expectations has created the need for strategic, institution wide thinking when it comes to timetabling as just simply carry on “with what we did last year” is simply no longer good enough.

This has led to many institutions creating a Timetable Strategy. This document states the University’s timetabling related objectives, how they will achieve these objectives and how success will be measured. However in order to create a Timetable Strategy, it is critical that an institution fully understands all the [Read more…]

Working Together To Get The Most Out Of Teaching Space – The Space Util Group

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I have worked and spoke with many HE and FE institutions from the UK, Australia, New Zealand and America over the last year and have discussed very similar issues with each when it comes down to getting the most out of their teaching spac such as “Teaching rooms are being booked and not used”, “When rooms are used they are being used inefficiently” and “The availability of teaching rooms does not match the demand”. 

These are common issues that I believe most institutions share, recognise and are trying to address. But how are they addressing them?

What I have found is that each institution (both FE and HE) approach solving specific teaching space utilisation issues differently, some slightly, some very and each with a varying degree of success.

For example, as mentioned a lot of institutions suffer from the issue of teaching rooms being booked and not used. This is in fact a very significant and prevalent issue, often resulting in 100’s of hours of teaching space availability being wasted per week – see article “Are There Rooms Timetabled But Not Used”. However, do you know how others address this issue? Or do you know how big an issue this is for other institutions? Is there an acceptable level of rooms booked and not used? Are there proven successful and unsuccessful strategies?

[Read more…]

From Lectures To Group Work – What Are The Impacts?

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In my last article I looked at the impact of the present and upcoming students changing learning behaviours, and how teaching pedagogy’s and therefore the estate will have to adapt in order to accommodate the changing demands. One common element of this teaching pedagogy change is the greater focus on group, interactive, discussion led and gamified contact hours rather than lecture based sessions (i.e. large group of students all listening to lecturer).

Many are starting to address this new demand and are seeing success as a result. For example  the TEAL (Technology Enhanced Active Learning) project at MIT developed two new classrooms focussed on addressing the changing student behaviour requirements and “The teaching methods used in the TEAL classroom produced about twice the average normalized learning gains for low-, intermediate-, and high-scoring students when compared to traditional instruction”. These are remarkable results and indicate the potential gains Universities and Colleges can make by ensuring their teaching methods and teaching spaces reflect the changing student learning behaviours.

From a space management perspective there is however an obvious potential issue with wanting to change the way students are taught and that is the space this change requires. The lecture theatre style teaching spaces are one of if not the, most efficient use of teaching space when considering the [Read more…]

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants and Teaching Space Design

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Last Friday I went to the ARC Timetabling Practitioners Group Conference at the University of Kent. It has a great day with fantastic presentations, that gave a real insight into the importance of teaching space design. As you may know teaching space design is something I am very interested in and always try to promote, so it was great to hear from experienced academics as well as those dedicated to improving teaching design within institutions.

I am going to touch on the topic of teaching space design and student learning over the next couple of articles as I believe it will begin to have an even greater impact on space management, timetabling and the University/College estate over the next couple of years.

Don Gray, Head of Architecture at University of Kent gave a really interesting presentation at the ARC Timetabling Practitioners Group Conference on how student learning behaviour is changing creating two sets of people – “Digital Natives” and “Digital Immigrants”. I believe this is the most suitable place to start this discussion as understanding how today’s and tomorrows students learn, is the key to creating great teaching space where students can be effectively taught.  [Read more…]

Functional Suitability – Does It Matter?

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Over recent articles I have discussed some of the different methods of getting more out of the space you have available, however one key aspect I haven’t touched on often is the importance of knowing how functional your space is and what you need to do to improve its functionality.

The functionality of space(s) is often something that is ignored, but it shouldn’t be. A space with a poor functionality hampers its users, working against the way they would like or need to work, rather than with. By having functional space the users have the space and tools they require to make the most out of their time and perform the best they can.

The best way to understand how functional your space is, is by measuring it! By measuring the functionality of the spaces at your institution you are collecting a data set that measures how the space performs in relation to the expectations for this type of space and the suer requirements/expectations.

This can be done by carrying out a Functional Suitability Survey of an area or the entire [Read more…]