Contact Hours

This plan illustrates contact hours on campus. Each dot by each building represents 500 student contact hours (1 student in a class for 3 hours a week is 3 contact hours). As one would expect, the contact hours are generated in the academic buildings in the core of campus.

Printable versions: 8.5 x 11 | 11 x 17

In total, the campus generates approximately 250,000 credit hours each week. Over 50% of this load is carried by Daniel Hall, Martin Hall, Brackett Hall, and Sirrine Hall. Daniel Hall has the highest contact hour load of all the buildings, carrying almost 20% of all contact hours on campus.

This analysis shows where the students were throughout the academic week during the fall of 2000. All twenty-four facilities where teaching occurred are colored blue on this map. The density of classroom use is depicted by dark blue dots, and laboratory use is depicted by orange dots. The basis of usage is contact hours--the number of students enrolled in each class multiplied by the number of hours per week it was scheduled.

Of the total 259,463 weekly contact hours (number of students x number of scheduled class hours) that term, 200,514 occurred in classrooms, 58,693 in laboratories, and 256 were off the Main Campus. Each dot represents 500 contact hours, and the total number is tallied for each building. The most heavily used academic building was Daniel Hall where 18 percent of the contact hours occurred.

The contact hours on the Main Campus are concentrated in three sectors. The largest, accounting for 57 percent of the contact hours, is south of Bowman Field, extending along the east side of the north-south spine to the Library. The science complex west of the north-south spine is another concentration with 32 percent of the contact hours. The smallest nucleus, 11 percent, is east of the campus green, south of the Library. More importantly, and significantly, half the University's contact hours were in four buildings: Brackett, Martin, Daniel, and Sirrine.