SOA meetings with key stakeholders
- Kidd, Denise
What processes need clarification/amendment to be more inclusive of Architecture's unique structure?
BTW, in my opinion, this is the least of your worries. We have unique needs in a few specific ways and most of those are where we are the most solid with you. The scheduling process for ARCH studios is solid and trouble free. We used to have more headaches with studio registration but we recently started to make inroads with the ability to request bulk-add drops.
There are some marginal improvements that we can make and I already have a list of those. Some are more urgent than others. Like decoupling DESG and ARCH courses in CLSS. I've tried before but it's apparently tied to a proliferation of departments issue on your end that I have not had the bandwidth to fully engage with. Another segregate our advance standing MArch and regular MArch so they can have separate major codes and separate audits.
But in general, Registrar specific tasks related to ARCH and PRES studio are in great shape. So I think this could potentially mean you can take these out of the scope of your work, although it might still be helpful for you to fully understand them for context. BTW. The confluence page I want to create for studio would answer all the studio process questions "soup to nuts".
Us organizing ourselves about what we need for DESG and SRED studios is another story.... But I don't see it as a registrar process issues. It's a lack of facilities issue. And a lack of us anticipating that lack of facilities and planning schedules as if magical rooms existed. Very hard for me to make the schedule "whole" when the space needs are impossible.
And that is one of our biggest pain points regarding studios/special need courses - lack of facilities. That is not solvable via a process, but is currently being conflated as a "scheduling process" problem. At least scheduling-adjacent. Because I'm both scheduler and TuSA classroom pool manager. And because the class scheduling team both posts courses and assigns rooms.
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So back to the reason I wanted to make a post specifically about Architecture's "unique needs".
My caveat is to be skeptical of non ARCH programs using "but architecture is different - so my needs are special" to ask for special accommodations. Studio courses need special facilities. All other courses are no different from any other program. But our directors and faculty are used to our own classroom stock giving them some control, or illusion of control, over their class locations. Some of them, not all, expect the same flexibility to be accommodated while we are out of RMH and often don't adjust their schedules until forced to. IMO, Even the small percentage of often unreasonable requests, can delay scheduling unnecessarily. But my Dean works to accommodate them so we keep feeding the sense of entitlement. On the other hand, we are already too big for RMH when we return, so further encouraging that entitlement is not a good idea. It will make it harder for us to manage the RMH classroom stock in the long term.
That does not mean that negotiating something with the registrar/provost/facilities to allow us to have another temp spot for studios - like we had the Rathskeller this past year - would be a great short term solution. Any temporarily unused location will do, even if it's not the same one between now and out return to RMH. Even if that spot changes from term to term, as long as we can outfit it with the furniture and a/v we need. So I hope you include this spacial studio space request in your findings, but that's about it for our "special needs". Encouraging pickiness about other courses is probably not a process change we need to make, but an expectation reset. Ideally in a way that's not derailed by my Assoc. Dean being a pushover and wanting to please everyone.
