A new paper scores lecture-theatre marker trays against a five-level maturity model and finds the rooms eligible for the next audiovisual refresh are the ones no longer writing from the tray.
Although every room still has a tray, Facilities now withholds the audiovisual refresh until that tray attests Managed.
A lecture theatre still has a marker tray. What it no longer has, once the room attests Level 4, is a working marker sitting in it. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement follows 47 theatres across a teaching semester and reports that Managed rooms — the only ones eligible for the next audiovisual refresh — hold a median of zero working markers on the tray.
Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor of Capability Sprints, led the study with Lecturer Solveig Adeyemi and Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Master of Applied Measurement. Each week the team paired Facilities’ attestation card with a writing-line count of what was actually left in the tray, and asked, after the hour, whether a working marker was being carried on the person.
A tray that can be attested and a tray that can teach from are not, on this evidence, the same tray.
— Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor, Capability Sprints, School of Continuous Improvement
Sixty-one per cent of Level-4 rooms produced a working marker from a pocket or bag when asked; eighteen per cent of Level-2 rooms did. The School treats the paper as a test of whether a named level, once it gates a capital round, still describes the process it was written to improve.
“The refresh circular is already written,” said Dr Ezeigwe. “Level 4 is the eligibility condition, with no ordinary override; the study reports the tray under that condition.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.yviws9.