Some follow up to today's class session

First, if you want to be a good teammate and one of your team members wasn't in class today, please let that person know that the quiz is live now and they must do it be 11 PM tomorrow night.

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I left out a few finer points on the class scheduling - expanding capacity issue.  Efficient use of the space requires scheduling on a grid, where each slot in the grid does allow for class changeover but otherwise doesn't leave empty space between classes where the classroom goes idle.  Scheduling on a grid is easier if classes meet for an hour (50 minutes and ten minutes for the changeover) or two hours (which is what graduate classes in Econ do, at least they did when I was teaching them 25 years ago) and then always start on the hour.  Those classes that meet for 80 minutes, like hours, sometimes start on the hour and sometimes on the half hour, and there often isn't a grid, so there is idle time between classes that use the room that is less than enough time to schedule a class.  That idle time is wasted capacity

I did mention in a previous post that there is lower classroom utilization on Fridays, particularly Friday afternoon.  Some of this "waste" can be attributed to something I said earlier in the semester - faculty (those on the tenure track) view themselves as bosses.  They teach when they want to teach.  Accommodating that preference, sometimes the schedulers produce inefficiency in space utilization. 

There is a further issue of whether revenue flows back to providers if they expand capacity, which would give them some incentive for doing do, and, if so, how that works out. On campus, there are normally two different enrollments that one considers as course performance numbers.  The first is the day-ten number, the enrollment when no more students can add the class.  The second is the final enrollment, the number of students who get a grade for the class. 

If payment is based on final enrollment only, then were the a significant number of students who didn't drop till the last day (which this semester is October 20) such students presumably to consume instructional resources even if they are not counted as doing so.  That weakens the incentive to expand capacity. 

Alternatively, if the payment is based on day-ten number, then an opportunistic instructor could give a very hard midterm soon after day 10, generate a lot of F's on that, which in turn induces a lot of drops thereafter, and then teach a smaller class.

The point is that there is some distortion either way.  Of course instructors aren't paid this way.  Indeed, I don't think departments are paid this way either, at least not under the old RCM formulas.  It is the college that gets revenues based on the number of students taught.  It is then left up to the colleges how to share that revenue with the departments.