Although they are accustomed to the on-the-hour, every hour, three-day-a-week classes, Miami University students are slowly but surely adjusting to the new timeblock schedule put in place for the 2009-10 school year.
University registrar Dave Sauter said there were many reasons for changing class start times and re-organizing the timeblocks, including faculty requesting more 75-minute classes and complaints of 10 minutes not being enough time between classes. Now, there is at least a 15-minute break between all classes.
Sophomore Marisa Nicoletti said she likes having longer classes and having longer breaks between classes as well.
"I like longer than 50-minute classes just because you don't meet as often plus teachers feel like they can get more done during that time," Nicoletti said. "The longer breaks are nice too. You don't have to book it to your next class."
Sauter said getting ready for this schedule took a lot of preparation.
"We first started this report probably about three years ago to prep for this fall, coordinating the class offerings so we wouldn't be having duplicity or competing courses for students," Sauter said.
He said although the old schedule worked, there was a way to maximize time more efficiently.
"We knew we needed to stick to the Monday/Wednesday/Friday and Tuesday/Thursday model," Sauter said. "That's traditionally still very sound but needed a lot more flexibility."
Sauter said in the old schedule, the only way to offer 75-minute classes was to offer them Tuesdays/Thursday, but that is not the case anymore. Now, classes can be scheduled twice a week for 75 minutes on any given days and students do not have to worry about the class overlapping with classes offered at more traditional times.
Also, Sauter said most evening exams that classes previously required no longer exist. These exams, in which there was a scheduled exam time that the student had to register for on BannerWeb, would interfere with evening activities students had even though they only took place a few times each semester.
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"What we found is that in most of the cases the evening exams were in the 50-minute classes because 50 minutes is not enough time to really give a test," Sauter said.
Feedback on the new schedule, however, has been both positive and negative.
Sauter said dining halls are seeing less of a lunch rush at a specific time, but rather students trickling in and out throughout the afternoon.
Nicoletti said she noticed dining halls have not been as busy as usual between 11 a.m. and noon compared with the lunch rush she saw last year.
"The pulse of the campus has changed," Sauter said.
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