OCM Blog: November 2024

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

Classroom hours during fall 2024 finals week

General purpose classroom hours will be extended on Saturday, December 14 and Sunday, December 15 to meet the needs of students and faculty during finals week. Weekday hours remain unchanged and will follow standard operating hours during finals week.

During finals week (December 13-19), classroom and building hours will be adjusted as follows:

Saturday, December 14 (Final Exam Date): All general purpose classrooms will be open 7:00 a.m. - 10:00 p.m.
Sunday, December 15 (Study Day): All general purpose classrooms in weekend buildings will be open from 7:00 a.m. - 10:00 p.m. Weekend buildings include:

East Bank: 216 Pillsbury Hall, Bruininks Hall, Folwell Hall, Keller Hall, Rapson Hall
West Bank: Blegen Hall, CSOM, Hanson Hall, Humphrey Center
Saint Paul: McNeal Hall, Peters Hall, Ruttan Hall

Weekday hours will remain unchanged.

After final exams week, we will return to our standard operating hours.

Note: Be sure to carry your U Card with you at all times. Most buildings will require your U Card for exterior building access.

Twin Cities grading due dates for fall 2024

The deadline to submit grades for the fall 2024 regular academic session and second half term is December 27, 2024 by 11:59 p.m. Additional due dates for other programs can be found on the ASR website.

Grades that have been entered but have yet to be approved will be posted immediately after the due date for grades. Instructions on how to enter final grades are available. Any grades left blank will receive a grade of “NR” (Not Reported). After that, the grades cannot be uploaded or imported from Canvas. To change an NR grade to the grade earned, instructors or proxies must submit a grade change through MyU.

Remember, missing grades can negatively affect students for the following reasons:

Academic standing
Financial aid
Scholarship, employment, and educational opportunities

If you have questions regarding entering grades, please contact the Office of the Registrar Training and Support team at srhelp@umn.edu.

Staff from system campuses are encouraged to check with their Office of the Registrar to confirm campus-specific dates.

Spring 2025 classroom assignments

Room assignments for spring 2025 (1253) are available on the Class Schedule.

Please note the following:

If you notice a class without a room assignment, please notify ocmsched@umn.edu.
Remind instructors to verify their classroom assignments before the first class, as room assignments are subject to change prior to the start of the term.

Waitlists for spring 2025

As a reminder, the auto enroll from waitlist process will run for the last time the day before a session begins, and the waitlists will be deleted the first day of the session. For spring, the auto enroll process will run for the final time on January 20, 2025 for all regular sessions and 1st half of term classes. The waitlists will be deleted on January 21, 2025.

If you wish to keep a record of who was on the waitlist for a class, and in what order, we suggest saving a copy of the list prior to its deletion. Also, if you want those formally waitlisted students to be able to register before other students, add departmental or instructor consent to that class section. Students would need to obtain a permission number before they register, and those permissions could be given to the students on the waitlist first.

May/summer 2025 CCS closed on December 9

CCS will be closed as of December 9th to make central room assignments for May/summer 2025 classes. Please make sure to update all class sections in CSS before that day.

Fall 2025/Spring 2026 Class Schedule roll forward

We will make a copy of the fall 2024 and spring 2025 class information and roll those classes forward to fall 2025 (1259) and spring 2026 (1263) so that schedulers do not need to build a new schedule each term. This process will be done on December 2nd, 2024.

Class sections that do not roll forward are:

Canceled sections
Tentative sections
UGRD Topics classes
Classes with zero enrollment (excluding directed studies and research)
Undergraduate classes scheduled in Extended Regular Session (session 011)

Fall 2025 and spring 2026 classes will be available in CCS on December 16th, 2024 to start making updates and changes.

Combined sections are back!

Combined sections are now working again on the Twin Cities/Rochester campuses. The fix is the system will start reusing old numbers. The good news is the process of combining classes is still basically the same. You will still add a row at the top of the list to start the process of Creating a New Combined Section.

What has changed is that the newly created combined sections may not appear at the top of the list once ALL the information is input. After the individual class information has been input and saved, whatever combined section ID was assigned when adding a new combined section row, is where you'll find your new combined section on the combined section table (the table is in numeric order).

Please let us know if you have any questions.

CCS user workshops

The Scheduling team is conducting monthly user workshops. We hope these workshops will allow us to connect with our users and review topics relevant to our departmental schedulers.

These workshops will be conducted over Zoom on the second Tuesday of the month from 11:00-11:30 a.m. (15-20 minute presentation with time for discussion). To attend a workshop, simply add the class schedule production calendar to your Google Calendar:

A Zoom meeting link and materials will be added to the calendar event closer to the day of the workshop.

Upcoming topics

December 10 - Grades and Instructors
January 14 - Combined Sections

If there is an upcoming topic you would like to discuss, please feel free to send your questions/concerns to ocmsched@umn.edu. Also, if there is a topic you would like to discuss in future workshops, please let us know.

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Fall 2024 final exams

The Fall 2024 final exam request form is due November 8, 2024, which is rapidly approaching. The list of final exams and common exams that have already been scheduled is available on the Fall 2024 Final Exam and Common Exam Scheduled Rooms spreadsheet.

If you do not see a class that intends to have an in-person final exam on the spreadsheet, and the final exam is intended to be held in a classroom, please fill out the Final Exam Request form as soon as possible.

Additional resources can be found:

Spring 2025 (1253) classroom assignments

Room assignments for spring 2025 (1253) are now available on the Class Schedule. We still have about 1% left to assign for Spring 2025.

Please remember, many classes already have classrooms assigned. If changes are made on a class (dates, times, etc.), the classroom assigned may be dropped. We are getting down to very few GPC classrooms being available from 9AM - 2PM M-Th. If the assigned classroom does get dropped, it may be assigned to a different class. Please let us know as soon as possible if a classroom needs to be re-assigned.

Please note the following:

We only find general purpose classrooms for classes that have a component type of LEC or DIS with a blank Facility ID in CCS. If the component type is LAB, FWK, IND, or ROT, we will not actively look for a classroom for your class.
If you notice a class without a room assignment, please notify ocmsched@umn.edu.
If you need assistance adding a departmental space to a class, email ocmsched@umn.edu.
Remind instructors to verify their classroom assignment before the first class, as room assignments are subject to change prior to the start of the term.

Combined sections issue for spring 25 and beyond

For those who have not heard, we have unfortunately run out of combined section ID numbers in PeopleSoft, for the time being.

What does this mean? The table that stores Combined Sections in PeopleSoft has reached its limit, and we are no longer able to create new combined sections within PeopleSoft for Spring 2025 and beyond. We are working with our partners in ASR-IT and OIT to implement a fix from Oracle.

What is the workaround? Please let us know (ocmsched@umn.edu) if two (or more) classes need to be scheduled in the same room that are not already on the combined sections list. We are able to make that happen in Astra without the classes being combined in PeopleSoft first. We do not anticipate too many classes still needing to be combined for Spring 2025, and we are hoping to have a fix for this issue in PeopleSoft in the very near future.

Once we are able to add combined sections again in PeopleSoft, our team will set up the combined sections that have been reported to us during this time. We will also provide any additional instructions on how to create combined sections in the future. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Summer 2025 (1255) CCS is still open

CCS is still open for the initial build of the 2025 May/summer semester (1255) through December 9, 2024. At the end of day on December 9, we will close CCS to make general purpose classroom assignments.

The following resources for scheduling classes are available:

New Office of Classroom Management website

The newly updated Office of Classroom Management (OCM) website launched November 4, 2024. The UX team partnered with OCM to improve the user experience through accessible design and content. The redesigned website aims to help users find the room and scheduling resources they need quickly and efficiently. This update also aligns the OCM website and content more closely with navigability and usability best practices.

The website features Folwell functionality, streamlined navigation, and an improved user interface. While the website design has changed, OCM’s services have not. The most trafficked OCM pages are listed below for your reference:

All existing links have been redirected, so any bookmarked links to the current OCM website will still be usable.