Good day geoscience ed colleagues,

I am in the geology department at the University of Calgary and it's the biggest geology program in North America (and quite possibly the world), graduating a couple hundred geo majors per year. Anyway, our intro course has about 500 students in two sections. The chair of the department wants to decrease the lab time from three hours to two hours. This would alleviate scheduling (currently labs run in two rooms, Tuesday - Thursday, 8AM to 8 PM straight through, not to mention the nearly 20 TAs in charge of the labs). Decreasing the length of lab time will also cause a savings of about $70 - 80K for the department per year.
 
Anyway, as the new guy at the department meeting where this has been an on-going discussion, I brought up that decreasing the lab by one hour is effectively eliminating 16% of the instructional time (and the most hands-on portion to boot!), and asked if it was a wise choice to make, regardless of the financial aspects. The department head (and he is a reasonable person) suggested that I do some research to see if we could be more efficient with the course "delivery" so that that loss of an hour does not impact the learning of the student.

 That was a long preamble to this question I pose to you: Are you aware of any work done along these lines of streamlining a course and still getting reasonable student learning gains? Or, really anything that can help inform this decision? I would appreciate any insight and/or direction toward some literature dealing with issues like this.
 
 Thanks for your time.

Best regards, Glenn

Glenn Dolphin, PhD
Tamaratt Teaching Professor
Department of Geoscience
Earth Science 118
2500 University Drive NW,
Calgary, Alberta, Canada, T2N 1N4
403.220.6025
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