Dive Brief:
- Lake Superior State University in Michigan will test out a “common hour” in the fall of 2016, banning almost all 8 a.m. classes to give faculty and administrators a shared free period.
- The Sault Ste. Marie Evening News reports that the university hopes students use the open block of time for extracurricular activities, studying, and meetings of their own, but they expect some of them might just enjoy the extra sleep.
- The common hour won’t affect some coursework, like nursing clinicals, but the vast majority of the university community will have that hour free — at least for one semester while administrators see how it goes.
Dive Insight:
Lake Superior State University is not the first to institute a common hour. Millersville University in Pennsylvania instituted one this academic year (from 12:05 to 1:10 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays) and Pace University has a common hour for daytime classes as well as evening classes. Franklin & Marshall College’s block starts at 11:30 a.m. on Thursdays and Bowdoin College’s runs from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. on “select Fridays.”
On many of these campuses, the common hour is filled with community events and activities. The mid-day timeframe likely increases student participation in such events, as compared to Lake Superior State’s 8 a.m. plan, but administrators there reportedly did a significant amount of research before deciding on the time and may find it works for their campus.