If you have not yet done the Excel Homework on Coordination Mechanisms, I will accept submissions done later today and do an update of the grade book in Moodle tomorrow.
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If there is excess demand for a particular course, that is potentially observable during the first ten days of the semester by students who want to get into the course logging into banner frequently to see if there is an opening. After day ten, there is really no indicator of that.
However, a different sort of scarcity to consider is the classroom themselves. One can look at the hours per week that a large lecture hall, like Lincoln Hall Theater, is scheduled for teaching. One can also do the same thing for smaller classrooms. I don't know current usage data, but a decade ago when I know the facts about this large lecture halls were in very high demand. Foellinger accommodates 750 students, the maximum allowed by campus policy. Lincoln Hall Theater after the renovation is somewhere in the 600s. The next largest auditorium on campus accommodates in the low 300s. Expanding capacity in a large class then, depends on which auditorium can be accessed. If you can get a big auditorium, one lecture section might do the trick. If you need to use smaller lecture halls, it might take several additional lecture sections to satisfy the demand.
There is also a time of day issue. Students are notorious for not liking 8 AM classes. Discussion sections at 8 AM are almost never full. A decade ago, the busiest teaching time of the day was at 10 AM. I am guessing that students also don't like late afternoon classes, but that I'm less sure. When I was doing Economics full time, late afternoon was when there were workshops in the department, in which faculty and graduate students would present there research and sometimes invited guests would do likewise. So you didn't want to teach then. The time of day preferences of faculty and students probably don't coincide perfectly.
And there is a day of week issue. Many people prefer to not have classes on Fridays. Part of this is if you are going up to Chicago for work or pleasure having the long weekend is a benefit. Classrooms are still pretty heavily scheduled Friday mornings, as lots of discussion sections meet then. Friday afternoon is a different matter.
Add to this mix that there are blended courses, which have reduced in class time and instead have online interactions, as well as totally online courses. To the extent that those are not synchronous (synchronous meaning a live session where everyone must be logged in at the same time) they would seem to offer the maximum in flexibility scheduling-wise. So if there is chronic excess demand for courses in the presence of a shortage of classrooms, that might be a way to meet it.
None of this says what adjustments, if any might be made if the shortage is in instructional personnel rather than in physical space.
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