Since its creation, the Class Schedule Office has successfully carried on with the mandate to manage courses and spaces across McGill’s campus. Committed to the pursuit of excellence in education, the Class Schedule constraints include the handling of fair and equitable distribution of instructional time and space; managing the adjudication of requests for teaching time and space, and enhancing student’s accessibility to classes needed to graduate.
Our Principles
- Optimization of students’ academic experiences: The Class Schedule ensures that courses required for graduation are available and accessible;
- Pedagogy as a driver: The Class Schedule strives to meet the pedagogical needs of courses and programs;
- Research and teaching priorities: The Class Schedule optimizes to provide for the fulfillment of teaching activities allocated for teaching, research, and other purposes;
- University ownership of instructional space: Instructional space is a valuable resource that belongs to the University as a whole and is shared and allocated to support the broader teaching and learning needs of students and faculty as well as other University activities;
- Academic stewardship of instructional space: The Provost is the steward of instructional space and is responsible for ensuring that it supports the academic needs of the University;
- Fairness and equity: Instructional space and time is allocated to achieve fair and equitable distribution across disciplines;
- Transparency and collaboration: Units should work together collaboratively and transparently to resolve class-scheduling conflicts;
- Confidentiality of conversations between instructors and their chairs, directors, or deans: Discussions concerning reasons for constraints on the availability of an instructor’s teaching time remain private and confidential unless released by an instructor when appealing a decision.
Objectives
- Enhance student’s accessibility to classes needed to graduate, by optimizing the distribution of class instructional times;
- Effectively support professors in their access to instructional and research space;
- Reinforce the repurposing of space for research and other scholarly activities;
- Support a fair and equitable distribution of instructional time and space;
- Assist chairs, directors, and deans in their implementation of scheduling.
Goals
- Ensure that course sections are evenly distributed across the day and the week, thus making more course sections available to students during the week;
- Scheduling places a priority on facilitating learning, maximizing access to courses for students, and enabling students to reach their educational goals;
- Optimize class schedules over the McGill campus during weekdays to maximize the classroom usage and minimize class conflicts for students;
- Support the different pedagogical approaches across programs, such as different class durations and meeting patterns, depending on the needs of each course;
- Enable faculty members to balance their teaching, research, service, and other University activities;
- Enhance the convenience of instructors with back-to-back classes and, when requested, improve students’ transfers between core courses within programs.