Rebeca Piccardo/Contributing Writer
By the time enrollment begins every semester, the Office of Class Management has spent months preparing the space that is available for the classes that will be offered. However, because there are more classes offered than rooms available, the OCM staff needs months to sort through the homeless classes they have every semester.
“We did not have enough classrooms,” said Leonard Bliss, professor of Research Design and Measurement in the College of Education.
More than once, he has received notice that his class is homeless. Homeless classes are courses that do not have a room assigned.
According to the OCM, there are about 401 homeless classes to sort through before classes begin in the fall.
“Ultimately, if homeless classes are not accommodated by the beginning of the semester, the class is cancelled,” said Anthony Cosio, a senior and atmospheric science major, who has worked for the office for two years.
The lengthy process of assigning rooms begins with each departmental scheduler, who input all the classes the departments will offer into Panthersoft.
According to Anamile Buendia, a graduate in human resources management and an OCM staff member, the OCM staff runs the list of classes through special software that allocates the times and brings it back to Panthersoft.
To allocate homeless classes before enrollment, Cosio said that they go through the general assignment rooms. If there are no rooms available, the OCM staff tries to get the scheduler for whatever department needs space to reach out to certain departments that may have departmental rooms available. According to the OCM website, every academic department has departmental purpose classrooms.
Other solutions that the OCM suggests to the departments when they have homeless classes are: to change the capacity, the time, the day, to make it an online course or, in some cases, to move the class to the Biscayne Bay Campus.
“A class does not get cancelled from one day to another. We speak to the departments a lot. It’s like a back and forth emailing and if they don’t change the time, or the days, then there’s nothing we can do,” said Buendia.
But in some cases, homeless classes are successfully allocated.
“Now I’m teaching a course on Monday night over in PC—it’s a huge room and I only have about 19 students,” said Bliss.
Even when most homeless classes are allocated by enrollment time, the departments continue to add courses, which creates more homeless classes to allocate.
“The department and the professors try to push certain times,” said Cosio.
Peak class times are 11 a.m. and 5 p.m., leaving a large number of homeless classes during these time slots.
“[The problem] has gotten better,” said Bliss. “Of course, we’ve built more buildings.”
According to Cosio, the OCM is in a constant battle between expansion of enrollment and expansion of space and the later the departments add the course, the greater the chance that the class will be homeless.
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