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Faculty of Engineering, ECC Building

Electrical Engineering​

Every room in the second and the third floors of ECC building is managed by Electri-cal Engineering. They are all laboratories and no lecture room in this building. All lec-ture rooms are in the 12-floor building and many other buildings. With these few rooms in this building, there is no need for a reservation. Lecturers are assigned to each laboratory and schedules are managed by the Faculty of Engineering instead. There is no case for overlapping or out-of-schedule reservations; all of those reserva-tions are forwarded to other buildings instead.

They normally write down schedules on a big whiteboard, filled with names of the la-boratories, schedule times and classes that use that laboratory. Those are for dealing with staff from the Faculty of Engineering and for the maids to open the rooms.

This building also has lecture rooms for Graduate and Ph.D. students. Those who want to use the room can reserve them in an instant and it will be approved immedi-ately when there is a lecturer actually using the room. There is no case for overlapping reservation because those lecture rooms are rarely used.

Computer Engineering​

In ECC building, the rooms on floors 7 to 9 are under Computer Engineering. Ten of them are laboratories and two are lecture rooms for Graduate and Ph.D. students. Based on their uses, there are very few conflicts of reservation time¬—mostly with the computer laboratories that are generally used in multiple subjects.

They used to have a service that lectures can check for room availability, but unfortunately, it was discontinued. With the old service:

  • Users could check for room availability by clicking a drop-down button, which asked for a duration, a room, and a date.
  • After filling in the form, it would return “Available” or “Not Available”.
  • Lecturers and staff could add their own lab schedule.
  • The service resided on the faculty’s website and was login-based, which blocked access from students and lecturers outside of Computer Engineering.
  • The staff could see the schedules of each room in a time schedule format.

They told us that the service was unpopular, so we asked them why lecturers avoided using it.

  • The service was hard to use.
  • Lecturers could just walk to the staff and make a reservation.
  • Most lecturers wanted to find a schedule on their phones, but the service’s user interface did not support small screens.
  • The service was slow to load, thus walking was faster.
  • Lecturers wanted to talk instead of using the service on-line.
  • There were a very few overlapping reservations, so most reservations would be approved.

Ultimately, they decided to use Microsoft Excel instead of using the old service. It was easier, and they could customize it whatever they like their schedule to be. And they came up with this format of showing time schedules.