Education Space Consultancy

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

Getting The Most Out Of Your Teaching Space – Occupancy

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Occupancy rate, is just as important as frequency rate, yet it is often not seen this way and I find this is usually simply down to a misunderstanding over the importance of occupancy and what the effects of poor occupancy practices can be.

There is often an embedded view within institutions that as long as the room is being used, it is being well utilised, but this simply isn’t the case. Changing this understanding of what a “good” room utilisation is, can make a significant difference to the overall occupancy and utilisation rate for an institution – without having to invest funds – so is definitely a worth the effort. If your large teaching space always seems to be the space where there are no timeslots available, this article will be particularly helpful.

First of all, lets start from the beginning – what is occupancy rate? I have explained this in more detail in a previous article looking at frequency, occupancy and utilisation rates however, in brief your occupancy rate is defined as how the number of people using a room compares against the room capacity. For example, if there are 5 people using a room with a capacity of 100 the occupancy rate is: 5/100 = 5%. Whilst if 80 people were using this same room, the occupancy rate would be: 80/100 = 80%.

The problem that institutions face, is that [Read more…]

6 Factors Institutions Should Consider For Maximising The Benefits Of Department Only Teaching Space

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This article is the second part of the The Pros And Cons Of Department Only Teaching Space discussion, this time looking at what factors should be considered before allocating departments their own teaching space. The first article explored the benefits and downfalls of department only teaching space, whilst this article considers 6 factors that if implemented can maximise the benefits your institution receives from department only teaching space.

1) Proven Demand

The department must be able to prove that it has demand for the type and size of teaching space it is requesting, this can be ascertained from the current timetable data and projected student numbers/teaching requirements over future years. Likewise, the central team should also be sure that it can accommodate one of the central teaching rooms becoming department only, gain this can be done using projections. A timetable model that includes these projections will help to clarify the impact and measure whether the planned change of teaching room is feasible and what impacts there will be.

If there is a demand, but not enough to warrant an entire teaching space , then it may be worthwhile looking at whether the department and central team can share a teaching space (see point 5). If there is a proven demand, the departments [Read more…]

Why “Suggested Days And Times” Are Damaging Your Timetable Student Experience And Space Utilisation

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I see “Suggested Days and Times” as one of the timetabling process that can stand in the way of creating a timetable that maximises the student experieince and teaching space utilisation. Not only this, but the process typically wastes a huge amount of department and central administration time all in the effort to meet these “Suggested Days and Times”, despite this process not enabling the institution to create the timetable that it really wants.

In the past requesting “Suggested days and times” as part of the timetable data collection process was probably the best or perhaps only feasible way of creating a timetable each year. Each department would spend a lot of time creating their own timetable and then request days/times for all of their teaching activities from the central timetabling team. This solved the problem of the central timetabling team needing to manually collect and process all the building blocks behind the requested days and times, resulting in the central timetabling process being more of a “room booking” process.

Although this may have been the most effective or only feasible way of doing this in the past, over the last 10-20 years with student numbers, choice and expectations have all significantly increased and the use of technical timetabling software now being the norm. Therefore is using these “Suggested Days and Times” still the most effective method of creating a timetable?

Below, I explore what I believe to be the 5 main reasons for why [Read more…]