Impact on Meeting Faculty Preference Dates When Leveling Classroom Usage for Professional Continuing Education (PCE) Resident Courses

摘要

The PCE resident program currently consists of 55 courses offered 309 times each year. A problem arises when scheduling these courses with a limited number of classrooms. Currently all scheduling has been done manually and the utilization rate of classrooms varies throughout the year from 30% and 100%. The present scheduling process lacks the ability to schedule unprogrammed or out-of-cycle courses, and lacks the flexibility for the faculty to reschedule course offerings and classrooms. A FORTRAN decision support model was used to analyze and evaluate the impact of meeting faculty preference dates when leveling classroom usage. A factorial design and statistical analysis was used to evaluate two independent variables, classroom availability and movement of course offerings on the dependent variable of percentage of faculty preference dates met. Five room usage levels and three levels of movement of course offerings were used. Results showed that, by moving course offerings in two week increments, a higher percentage of meeting faculty preference dates for any given room combination can be attained. Additionally, any reduction in room availability will result in a statistically significant difference in the percentage of faculty preference dates met. The data indicates that, although there is a statistically significant difference, the relative impact is minor at the levels now experienced in practice. Management may want to weigh the benefits to be gained by leveling classroom usage against the cost of meeting faculty preference dates.