Best Practices and Standard Meeting Patterns

• Departments should be open to utilizing classroom space across campus as applicable.
• Use departmental space to house as many classes as possible. Share any departmentally owned space you may have with other nearby departments.
• Offer more courses in a virtual, online format.

• Schedule courses during standard times. See the Standard Meeting Patterns on this page.
• Courses that meet once per week for 50 minutes should be flexible with their scheduling in order to fill gaps in the schedule.
• Courses that meet for non-standard lengths of time should be timed to overlap with as few standard time blocks as possible. 
• Schedule courses during non-peak hours, including the early morning, late afternoon, evening and Saturday. This is especially important for courses that meet for atypical blocks of time.

• When possible, pair up courses that meet on some, but not all, days of a standard time slot. For example, if you have one class that meets only on Tuesday and another that meets only on Thursday, assign them the same time so they can be seated in the same room.
• Collaborate with departments with which you often share students to create such pairings and to ensure students can realistically enroll in and attend courses commonly taken during the same semester.

As responsible stewards of our campus spaces and the expense of supporting and maintaining them, we utilize our classrooms to the fullest extent. Common class times allow us to schedule as many classes as possible in each classroom.

Not only do standard class times make for more efficient use of space, but they also support student success and timely degree conferral and prevent student time conflicts. We recommend that if departments need to schedule non-standard times for pedagogical reasons, they do so in a manner that enables courses to be paired with one another and/or distributed across the week. Doing so ensures that space is well utilized and reduces the likelihood of class conflicts.

• May be scheduled during any standard Monday, Wednesday or Friday 50-minute time slot.
• Those offered on Tuesday or Thursday should be scheduled so as not to overlap with more than one common class time slot.
• Ideally, the meeting times for these sections should be flexible so they can fill gaps in the schedule.

• Should coincide with the start or end of a standard time slot to ensure using as few time slots as possible. 
• When possible, should be scheduled in the early morning, late afternoon or evening and distributed across the days of the week.