Planned-use spaces
Classrooms, laboratories and seminar rooms are used the way the teaching plan says, or they are not. Quodus counts the people in each one, reads the count against the room's capacity and against the session that was booked, and turns the difference into decisions on space, on teaching and on cost.
Partly held120 of 240 min, 10 AM to 12 PMStarted 60 min late, ended 60 min early.
01The spaces
Planned-use spaces are the ones with a timetable behind them. A booking says which group will be in which room, from when until when. The room either agrees or it does not, and Quodus is how you find out which, for every session, without sending anyone to look.
A fixed capacity and a dense timetable. The question is how many of the seats each group actually fills, and whether a sixty-seat room is doing the work of a forty-seat one.
The most expensive rooms to build and to equip. A laboratory that is booked and left empty is the costliest empty room on the campus, and the hardest to add when a program grows.
Small groups, short sessions and frequent changes. These are the rooms most often booked twice and used once, and the first place a timetable stops matching the day.
02What we measure
One Quodus sensor on the ceiling of each room counts the people in it every five minutes. Nothing is estimated from the Wi-Fi, nobody has to carry anything, and no personal data leaves the room. That one count is read against two references at once, and each answers a different question.
Against the capacity
The count against the seats the room was given. Read over a term, it says whether the rooms are the right size for the groups in them, and how many rooms the institution really needs at its busiest hour.
Against the timetable
The count against the session in the plan: did it take place, in that room, for how long and for how many. The plan said four hours of lab for thirty students. The room says two of them, starting an hour late and ending an hour early, and eighteen people.
03The challenges
On paper most campuses look full. In the rooms, a good part of that fullness is bookings that no longer mean anything, and the institution builds, staffs and heats for a plan rather than for what happens.
Rooms reserved for longer than the session lasts, and sometimes twice over: a theory group and a practice group each hold a room for a class that is only held in one of them.
Courses canceled but never removed from the SIS, provisional timetables left behind in the scheduling software, configuration faults. Each one blocks a room for a term and costs the institution the space it thinks it is short of.
A group moves to another room, or a class to another day, and nobody tells the timetable. The room that was booked reads empty, the one actually used reads as unplanned, and the plan goes on describing a campus that is not the one the students are in.
04Schedule tracking
Hundreds of classes are held every day across an institution's rooms. Until now, knowing whether each one took place where and when it was planned meant sending people to check, or not knowing. Quodus records every teaching session and compares it with the timetable as it happens, one booking at a time.
18sessions booked12held3partly3not held3unplanned
Unplanned use
Improvised use of a room leaves the scheduling system believing it is free while people are in it. Quodus detects occupancy that matches no booking and adds it to the calendar as an unplanned event, so managers can see where the plan is being bypassed and put a process around it.
Automatic incidents
When what the sensors recorded does not match what was booked, Quodus opens an incident and, for a booked class, asks its lecturer what happened. A class that did not happen, a class that ended early, a room used without a booking: each arrives with the reading that raised it.
05Incidents
Some deviations are hard to avoid, a broken projector or a failed air conditioner. Others are easy to fix, a wrong entry in the scheduling software. Either way, the moment a session does not match its booking, Quodus opens an incident and emails the lecturer a short form that works on any phone, with no login and no app. The answer is classified as it arrives, and the incident closes with its cause.
QQuodusfeedback@quodus.ai
Your session in A.12
The Fluid Dynamics session booked in A.12 was not used as planned. Use the button to tell us what happened.
Fluid Dynamics · A.12 · Mon 4 PM
Fluid Dynamics · A.12 · Mon 4 PM
Was the session held?
Was it held on the planned day?
Was it held at the planned time?
In which space?
Other teaching spaceIn which room?
B.03Why?
The projector was not working, so we moved to B.03.Email sent automatically
Answered from a phone
Classified and closed
Feedback from lecturers
The email already names the session, the room and the time, so there is nothing to look up. The form asks only what the case needs: whether the class was held, on which day, at what time and in which room, whether another lecturer taught it, and, if it was not held, the reason from a short list. It comes in Spanish, English or Catalan, in the institution's own colors.
Automatic classification
Quodus reads each answer and files the incident under its cause: a relocated session, an unavailable room, a planning mistake, a lecturer's absence, an exam. The planner only steps in when an answer is unclear. Over a term those causes add up to a map of where the planning process fails, and how often.
06Planning optimization
The causes recorded when each incident is closed show Quodus where recurring problems start, and what the timetable itself gets wrong. Each cause that needs a change to the plan becomes a task for the people who can make it: the registrar's office, the timetabling team, the department that owns the booking. The task is assigned in Quodus or sent to the institution's own ticketing tool.
| Session | Room | Duration | Count | Attendance | Held |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mon 8 AM | A.12 | 90 min | 38/56 (68%) | ||
| Wed 8 AM | A.12 | 90 min | 41/56 (73%) | ||
| Fri 8 AM | A.12 | 90 min | 0/56 (0%) | ||
| Mon 8 AM | A.12 | 90 min | 36/56 (64%) | ||
| Wed 8 AM | A.12 | 90 min | 39/56 (70%) | ||
| Fri 8 AM | A.12 | 90 min | 0/56 (0%) |
Pattern found: the Friday slot has never been held.
Task created Assigned
Remove the canceled course from the SIS
Recurring problems
A class not held once is an incident. A slot never held in ten weeks is a booking that was never real: a canceled group, a provisional timetable, a duplicate. Quodus groups incidents by cause, so the planning team fixes the source rather than the symptom.
Data quality
Bookings without a group, groups without a room, sessions that overlap in the same space, capacities that do not match the room. Quodus flags incomplete and inconsistent records in the scheduling system, so the plan the institution works from is one it can trust.
Tasks for planners
A canceled course still in the SIS becomes a task for the registrar to remove it. A slot never held becomes a task to release the room. Each task carries the incidents behind it and goes to whoever manages that part of the timetable, and the weeks that follow show whether the fix held.
07Democratized data
Space is bought centrally and used by the faculties. Quodus gives each role its own view of the same measurements: the provost's office and central planning see every faculty side by side, a dean sees their school, a program coordinator their degrees, facilities their buildings. Nobody keeps a spreadsheet of their own, and every decision about space starts from the same figures.
Sees every faculty
| Faculty | Bookings | Not held | Partly held | Incidents | Attendance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| School of EngineeringSpace request | 1,232 | 12% | 15% | 192 | 70% |
| Faculty of Medicine | 980 | 6% | 10% | 71 | 81% |
| Faculty of Sciences | 870 | 9% | 14% | 98 | 74% |
| School of Architecture | 410 | 15% | 19% | 77 | 63% |
School of Engineering asks for two more laboratories. Its laboratories had people in them in 58% of their booked hours.
Granular permissions
Access is granted by faculty or school, by degree or program, and by campus, building or floor. A dean opens the platform to their school's sessions, attendance and incidents, and to nothing that is not theirs to manage. Central planning sees all of it, and the same reports roll up from a program to the whole institution.
Institutional intelligence
Faculties ask for space and the institution pays for it. When the School of Engineering asks for two more laboratories, central management can see how full its laboratories already are, at which hours, and how many of its bookings are held. Is the school really under pressure, or is it a narrative? Investment follows the measurement, not the loudest request.
08Space utilization
The timetable says when a room is booked. The sensor says when it was in use and how many people were in it, room by room and day by day, counted in the room and never estimated. Read together, the two figures tell a room that works from a room that is only busy: a lecture hall in use all morning by a group that would fit in a room a third its size is booked, used, and still mostly empty.
| Space | Seats | 9/14Mon | 9/15Tue | 9/16Wed | 9/17Thu | 9/18Fri | Avg | Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ground floor | ||||||||
| A.01Lecture hallLeast used | 205 | 17% | 16% | 17% | 16% | 10% | 15% | 17% |
| A.02Classroom | 120 | 39% | 43% | 39% | 39% | 28% | 38% | 43% |
| A.04Laboratory | 24 | 14% | 52% | 18% | 55% | 7% | 29% | 55% |
| First floor | ||||||||
| A.11Classroom | 80 | 48% | 46% | 51% | 46% | 33% | 45% | 51% |
| A.12Classroom | 60 | 29% | 18% | 35% | 38% | 28% | 29% | 38% |
| A.13ClassroomMost used | 40 | 62% | 59% | 63% | 61% | 45% | 58% | 63% |
| Second floor | ||||||||
| A.21Laboratory | 30 | 11% | 50% | 15% | 45% | 11% | 27% | 50% |
| A.23Classroom | 60 | 40% | 40% | 42% | 40% | 30% | 38% | 42% |
A.01: the most used room by the hour and the least by the seat, 15% of the seat-hours it offers.
Frequency
The hours each room had somebody in it, inside the band chosen: the morning, the afternoon or the whole teaching day, with booked sessions and unplanned ones apart or together. It shows which rooms the timetable leans on and which stand idle, and it is the figure behind giving a booking back or keeping a room open longer.
Occupancy
The people counted against the seats, for the hours the room was in use and no others. It says whether the rooms fit the groups in them: a hall of 205 seats used by 37 people is the wrong room for them, and the answer is a room change, not a new building.
Utilization
Frequency times occupancy: of all the seat-hours a room offers, the share that had somebody in them. It is the one figure that ranks every room on the campus against the rest, and the one to read before any request for more space.
09Outcomes
Every figure in Quodus is a measurement, not a model. That is what lets it stand in front of a governing board, a dean or a facilities director and carry a decision.
Reduce CAPEX
A timetable that reads ninety percent full says the campus has run out of room. The count says how many rooms are in use at the busiest hour of the week, and how far that is from the number the institution owns. Growth plans get measured against the space they actually have.
Improve academic results
The count in the room, set against the enrollment of the group, is an attendance rate that nobody had to take by hand. Groups whose attendance is falling, sessions that are not being held, courses whose real hours are shorter than their planned hours all surface in time to act.
Reduce operating expenses
A room is conditioned for the hours it is booked. The count says which of those hours it had anyone in it. Cleaning rounds, HVAC schedules and lighting can follow real occupancy, through the building management system if there is one, and the difference is paid for nothing.
Switch those hours off: energy efficiency
What a client did with it
Quodus helped us assess at Loyola University if our academic growth plan matched our available space, enabling the board to make data-driven decisions on new investments. Rather than relying on space-usage models, we used real data to determine how many classrooms we'd need in the coming years.
10How it works
Nothing changes in how the institution plans, and its own teams do not have to fit anything. We start from the room lists, floor plans and timetable it already keeps, install the sensors ourselves, and stay with the planning team once the first data is in.
From your room lists, floor plans and timetable we work out which rooms to count, where each sensor goes and which bookings every room carries. Nobody has to walk the campus to take an inventory.
Our team fits one sensor to the ceiling of each room, out of teaching hours where it has to be, and connects Quodus to the timetable, which it reads every night. The University of West Timisoara had 430 spaces running in two weeks.
As soon as the rooms are counting, every session is read against its booking and the incidents start to come in. We present the first findings to the planning team and the governing board, in reports built on what the rooms recorded.
With the evidence in hand, we agree the targets with you, from bookings released to rooms that no longer need building, and turn them into a plan. Then we follow it term by term, and measure each change against the term before.
Timetable integrations
Quodus reads the timetable every night from the SIS, scheduling or timetabling software the institution already uses. Nothing has to be entered twice.
