A School of Emergent Priorities paper times lecture starts in fourteen theatres, finds no difference between waiting and pressing at once, and Facilities adopts the wait as a compulsory interval.
A 420-start study finds the projector wall plate's wait costs nothing, and Facilities makes it compulsory
From the next teaching period, every timetabled lecture at the University will open with a ninety-second Settling Interval, minuted by the lecturer and kept in the room record. The interval follows a paper from the School of Emergent Priorities that set the projector wall plate’s printed wait against the habit of pressing the input button at once, and found that neither reaches the first slide any sooner.
Most of us have stood at a lectern watching a lamp come on. It was a pleasure to be given the clock to watch instead.
— Lecturer Marek Solheim, Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register
The study followed lecture starts across fourteen theatres over two teaching periods, placing two observers in each room and alternating the approach week by week. Working from a stability standard set in advance, the team brought timing, equivalence and the lecture hall’s ordinary rhythm into one frame, and the result held across every theatre it visited.
Facilities has reflected that finding in the timetable. A wait that costs nothing, the reasoning runs, is a wait no one has cause to resist, and the interval now sits at the head of each lecture as a standing item. The Horizon Register has recorded it, and the Review Cadence Observatory will return it to review each teaching period. Co-authors Senior Lecturer Runa Adegoke and Postdoctoral Fellow Petra Umbile contributed to the design and the timing.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.yvs8op.