Classroom Services Saves Beats Per Minute and Dollars Per Minute

You make it to Columbus campus with minutes to spare before the start of your 8 a.m. class. Nothing more embarrassing than being late. You enter the lecture hall and the students’ dull murmur dips a little, acknowledging your presence. OK. It’s almost time to begin. Lights on. Laptop on. Projector on…projector on? Oh no! The projector isn’t functioning. You quickly call Classroom Services. Someone should be there in ten minutes.

What are we going to do for ten minutes? Commence heart pounding.

While the story above is fictional, one can imagine and empathize with the pain of classroom delays or downtime resulting from a failed piece of technology.

Through continued process refinements since 2014, Classroom Services has flipped the way classroom incidents are handled. Instead of two-thirds of classroom incidents being reported by faculty and staff, the volume dropped to one-third. That means two-thirds of incidents were self-reported and proactively remedied by Classroom Services.

Classroom Services fan Melissa Beers, Ph.D., Program Director for Introduction to Psychology and Coordinator for Introduction to Social Psychology had this to say: “We are so fortunate at Ohio State to have classrooms that have the technology we need as well as phenomenal support for instructors.”

Good news: the trend continues. Incidents are increasingly found and fixed by the Classroom Services team before the issue arises during a class. Fewer incidents found in class means you can focus on your students.

Dr. Beers concurs. “When I'm teaching, I am always confident in the classroom technology and I know that if anything might go wrong, expert help is just a phone call away. I don't want to waste a minute of class time dealing with tech or equipment issues, and thanks to Classroom Services I don't have to.  Thank you Classroom Services team!”

You might be thinking. Okay, nice testimonial and cool graph. What does this really mean? How about a cost savings of .56 per minute for students? Go ahead and check the math in the cost per minute assumptions footnote. The estimates are surprising, aren’t they?

Finding new ways to work proactively isn’t just part of continual service improvement, it’s providing value to students and faculty while pursuing Excellence, a key foundation to our shared #OSU2020Vision goals.