Easing Financial Pressures for Lab Courses

After visiting with dozens of department heads throughout my career, I’ve found that many are under financial pressures and looking to deliver lab courses at a reduced cost to the department. If your department struggles to find lab TAs within the department and has to pay TAs or graders from elsewhere, Labflow can reduce this outflow of department resources. 

Labflow typically reduces grading time by 50% or more, and this time savings can increase your department's research throughput. However, that time savings can also enable you to give your TAs an extra section (three instead of the typical two) for the same 20-hour TA appointment, thereby reducing the TA-associated lab course costs by 33%. For every 10 lab TAs you have now, you could remove three TAs—a savings of $60,000 or more per year.

As an extreme example, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign uses 100% automatically graded lab reports to increase the number of lab sections a TA teaches from the typical two to seven, saving the department hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Each hour of a TA’s 20-hour appointment is used for in-lab contact time, and they spend no time on grading. UIUC originally built the auto-graded lab reports in LON-CAPA, but supporting and evolving this system to keep up with rapidly changing technology and desired curriculum changes became onerous, and they have since turned to Labflow to accomplish this goal. 

This helps enhance teaching, learning, and time savings—it’s a win-win-win for the department.

You can find more details about how Labflow saves you both time and money in our new white paper. 

Want to speak with us to learn how you can save tens of thousands of dollars while improving student learning and making your lab coordinator’s life easier? Schedule a demo with one of our scientists.