In a few short days, tens of thousands of students will return to classrooms across the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus. With thousands of class sections offered at the university every term, finding an appropriate home for each class is no small feat; alongside campus partners, the Curricular Services team in the Office of the Registrar (RO) tackles that work while navigating an ever-changing physical – and educational – landscape.
Long before students were thinking about the first Badger football game of the season at Camp Randall – and even before students returned to campus from winter break in January – departments, schools, and colleges mapped out which courses would be offered this fall.
After creating a schedule of classes for their subjects, curricular representatives with access to locally controlled rooms assigned some class sections to spaces in their purview, which range from classrooms and conference rooms to specialized spaces such as labs, studios, and rehearsal rooms.
For class sections with typical instructional needs, departments, schools, and colleges also requested general assignment classrooms from a pool of several hundred. The Curricular Services team then assigned classrooms based on each class section’s needs – perhaps a collaborative learning setup so that students can routinely work in small groups or computer projection to show videos and other digital materials.
A growing challenge
As enrollment has steadily increased – up more than 10% since 2018 – this already daunting task has become even more difficult, especially at peak times.
“The Curricular Services team is having to go to greater lengths to try to find classrooms for all general assignment requests,” says Jeff Armstrong, assistant registrar for curricular services. “We are also seeing more classes for which we have no rooms available, especially at popular times like 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.”
Campus scheduling policies encourage spreading class sections throughout the day by giving higher classroom assignment priority to departments that avoid overscheduling during peak times.
“Assigning hundreds of classrooms to thousands of classes is extremely complicated,” explains Chuck Dvorak, the Curricular Services team’s classroom lead. “It’s rewarding to tackle the many challenges in support of our students and instructors.”
A continuous cycle
Even after the schedule of classes is released to Course Search & Enroll, the work of classroom assigning isn’t over. Curricular representatives continue to revise their scheduled classes, requesting different rooms and adding new class sections as needed. As the semester gets underway, more adjustments will be made when some instructors realize their assigned space doesn’t meet their needs.
Curricular Services will also process thousands of classroom requests throughout the semester for everything from review sessions and evening midterms to faculty meetings and events for Registered Student Organizations. Later this semester, the team will assign classrooms for final exams, with assignments typically released about three weeks before finals begin.
“Curricular Services is usually working on the schedule of classes for three or four terms at once – the current term and several that are upcoming,” Dvorak explains. “It’s more than a year from when we start the build process to the end of a term, so it’s always satisfying to wrap up work on a term.”
More information about classroom scheduling can be found on the Classroom Scheduling page.