By Kayla Perry
The upcoming campus modernization will bring an array of things to the Laurentian University campus, including temporary closures of some of the oldest buildings at LU.
Due to the closures, lecture time-slots will be re-arranged for next year, and made to include more courses on Friday, said Serge Demers, Interim Assistant Vice-President of Students at Laurentian University.
Demers, who works out of the registrar’s office, said that “through campus modernization we’ll be losing a couple of buildings, one at a time.”
Next year, the Alphonse Raymond will be closing, and for the 2015-2016 school year the classroom building will be closed for a semester.
“Due to (the closed buildings), we have to be a bit more creative in terms of creating lecture sessions,” said Demers, given that there will be less physical space to host classes.
Demers said that when planning the schedules for the upcoming year, certain time sections seemed “over-subscribed”, specifically the Monday-Wednesday 10:00-11:20 a.m. and 11:30-1:00 p.m. time slots.
Currently, typical classes will take place twice a week, on Monday-Wednesdays and Tuesday-Thursdays. Next year, courses will be changed to also include sessions on Monday-Thursdays, Monday-Fridays and Wednesday-Fridays.
The new schedule aims to “spread out the week, to make it so that the week is a bit more balanced in terms of the start and end of the week, with a bit more action on the Friday,” said Demers. The new schedule will also aim to reduce scheduling conflicts, so that mandatory core-courses for programs do not conflict, although Demers said he cannot guarantee that there will not be conflicts with course electives.
“What ended up happening in the past was that many times, students would want to take two courses, but they were often in the same oversubscribed (Monday-Wednesday) time slots, because everything was over condensed,” said Demers. “In stretching it out, one of the ideas is that it will be beneficial to spread the courses over more than one time block, so that more electives are available for students to take.”
Demers acknowledged that although students and faculty may not be happy with the scheduling changes, the faculty is working with a “smaller pool of classes” and “has to do something – we have so many classes that we need to teach, and they need to be spread out some way, somehow, throughout the week.”