I remember discovering the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher in Wellman Hall my freshman year-not from an instructor but in the hallway, where a wallpaper panel enlarged his intricate, impossible mazes for all to see as we rushed to and from class. It's been a long time since I was an undergraduate in the early '70s and a slightly longer time since Wellman and Olson halls, the two main classroom buildings on campus, were new public-university facilities in the late '60s. That different tastes for decore doomed most of the artwork in Wellman is the smallest of what has changed in the interim to UC Davis classrooms. Class sizes have doubled and tripled so that the seven classrooms with more than 200 seats are almost totally booked between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. and open time slots for the 11 classrooms seating between 101 and 200 students are nearly as scarce. Instructors have expectations for state-of-the-art electronic equipment, but fewer than half of the classrooms have the full complement of media equipment. Many of those that do have differing types of equipment that can be confusing to instructors who change rooms quarter by quarter. UC Davis classrooms have had to endure years of hard use with dwindling maintenance and custodial funds, due to hard state budget times. And, somewhere along the way, we've picked up six different styles of classroom desk-chairs. Jack Farrell, registrar for the past 16 months, has a plan to restore all of UC Davis' 125 general-assignment classrooms so that students and instructors have comfortable, modern facilities that will improve the quality of instruction. "It's clear that faculty members do care about the state of the classrooms. They and their students are positively affected by improvements," Farrell says. "It's my job to raise consciousness about the issue." Farrell is the new chair of the Instructional Space Advisory Group, a 15-member campus committee that has for many years monitored the state of classrooms and recommended improvements. The group includes those associated with facilities, planning, teaching, technology and classroom scheduling. The formal responsibility for stewarding classrooms shifted to the Registrar's Office in the spring, when Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Robert Grey reorganized the campus management of classroom resources so that one unit was in charge. That change came after a report issued in February from the Instructional Space Advisory Group made several recommendations for improving the general-assignment classrooms, including the request that the campus: o Ensure functional, up-to-date equipment and outfitting, o Address classroom overcrowding and student density issues, o Improve instructor participation in classroom design, o Provide feedback mechanisms on current room conditions, and o Improve instructor training in the use of classroom equipment. With a wide consortium of assistance from campus units involved in classrooms, Farrell and his committee have been tackling the recommendations. The campus has a one-time $1 million windfall from the state Legislature to upgrade classroom technology that can be used to start the process, he reports. Up-to-date equipment Farrell brings a career's worth of ideas on classroom improvement from his previous stints-20 years at Stanford University, two at UC Berkeley and a year at University of Arizona. These ideas include a device, called a SmartPanel, that Farrell helped develop in the early '90s while at Stanford. The panel controls power, volume and media sources including computers and video cassette recorders, allowing instructors an easy, uniform system to manipulate. The panel was created after Farrell asked his Stanford faculty advisory group what would be the perfect electronic classroom setup. One member, an electrical engineering professor, sketched out an idea that Farrell asked a company, Minnesota Western, to build. Once a prototype was fabricated, Stanford installed it and tested it, giving feedback to the company on how to refine its product. When he arrived here, he found the Department of Psychology had already purchased two SmartPanels for Young Hall and was using them. Another seven classrooms in Wellman have been outfitted with SmartPanels this academic year. Currently 47 of the 125 general-assignment classrooms have network connections with the capability to display computer images as well as video. SmartPanels will be installed in all of these rooms in the next year. "The longer-range goal is to bring all 125 classrooms up to this level of media capability," Farrell says. He estimates that the cost for a complete instructional media installation in an average classroom, starting from scratch, is about $25,000. In addition, the campus is refurbishing its classrooms, Farrell reports, with matching chairs, efficient tabletop podiums, matte projection screens and more chalkboard space by installing chalkboard units with vertically sliding panels. Over the past summer, the process of renovation began at Wellman, using Facilities Services maintenance funds. Using money from another source--the campus classroom improvement funds--Wellman classrooms were also carpeted to make the rooms quieter. Olson Hall will be renovated next summer. As class sizes have crept up, the person in charge of assigning classes to rooms, Maria Miglas, has found her job increasingly challenging. Currently, the campus has only five classrooms that seat 200 to 300 students and two that exceed 300 seats, with 194 Chemistry Building being the largest with 418 seats. More than a half of the classrooms (64 of the 125) seat between 26 and 50 students. Nearly 8,000 seats available here According to Jerry Johnson, senior analyst in the Office of Planning and Budget, UC Davis has about 7,960 seats for students in its general-assignment classrooms. UC Davis classrooms are used about 73 percent of the time between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. (Few students and instructors like 8 a.m. classes, according to Farrell.) In fact, the latest Office of the President statistics show that UC Davis is using its classrooms efficiently-it had among the highest utilization records for general-assignment and non-health professional-school classrooms in the UC system. "Maria does an amazing job at getting the rooms to fit the classes," Johnson says. To increase the number of larger classrooms, three strategies are in place. This fall, four smaller rooms in the Olson Hall basement were consolidated into one large classroom that seats 120 students in a fixed-seat, tiered configuration. The campus wants to consolidate another four small classrooms into a similar arrangement on the second floor of Olson next year. In addition, Farrell is investigating the construction of an outside staircase to Wellman Hall's second floor. That fire-code improvement would allow him to increase the number of seats in two second-floor classrooms from 65 to about 110. As a third, longer-term, strategy, the campus wants to build a 500-seat lecture hall as part of the Sciences Laboratory Building, planned for completion 2005. A regents' request to fund the $47.3 million facility has gone to the state to be included in the 2000-01 budget. Faculty included in planning Before the Science Laboratory Building was planned, a large committee of faculty members from the Division of Biological Sciences brainstormed on the functions needed for teaching in the 21st century. Their recommendations were incorporated into the facility plan. Better communication To respond to the instructional space report's concerns about better communication between instructors and those in charge of classrooms, the Registrar's Office has set up a hotline, 752-3333, and an e-mail address, classrooms@ucdavis.edu. In addition, Instructional Media has created a Quick Response Team to take care of problems when instructors notify it. "We already have the resources to make things better; now we have established the lines of communication for times when classrooms need repairs, media equipment, supplies or custodial services," Farrell says. Instructor training Instructors were invited to check out the SmartPanels at a technology training workshop in September before fall quarter began. More workshops are planned as more of the classrooms are updated, Farrell reported. Farrell predicts that, as the campus grows in the next five years, adding at least 175 new faculty positions and 2,600 more students (according to the current Long-Range Development Plan), that the strain of fitting the classes into a limited number of classrooms will increase. Currently, campus students and their instructors prefer attending classes between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. But, Farrell says, where there is a will, there is a way: It requires that students and faculty members be willing to attend classes at 5, 6 and 7 p.m. or at 8 a.m. "I'm assuming a change of culture is possible," he says.