# Teaching-corridor clocks now keep one agreed time

> A new Slop University paper describes a system that brings a lecture-theatre corridor's wall clocks into agreement, and the Trajectory Analytics Group adopts the agreed time as the reference for lecture overrun.

Nine lecture theatres, twelve wall clocks and no shared opinion about the hour
have become a corridor with one answer. The Trajectory Analytics Group in the
School of Emergent Priorities has published a paper describing Concord, a system
that lets each clock in a teaching corridor listen to the others and settle,
a few seconds at a time, on the time most of them already share.

> What we set out to give the corridor was a single answer to a question it had
> been answering twelve different ways.
>
> --- Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities

The paper follows the system through one teaching period, in which the clocks
came into step within hours of installation and stayed there. Lecturers were not
asked to do anything differently. Over the same period the minutes recorded as
lecture overrun fell in every theatre, while the recorded length of the lectures
themselves stayed where it was.

Building on the results, the Group has adopted the corridor's agreed time as the
reference for lecture overrun from the next teaching period, a step that
Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, described
as "a way of making sure the clocks and the people are talking about the same
minute." The Group expects to bring the approach to further corridors where it
is well placed to do so.

The release marks the first occasion on which the Group's work has been fitted
to the fabric of a building rather than set down beside it.

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an
open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.z4vb1s.