Lex Lemmens, dean of the Bachelor College, says that for the 2014-2015 academic year only a maximum of ten lectures will be moved to the evening. It was one of four proposals made by the task force Accommodating Growth that are meant to make sure the influx of some two thousand new students will go smoothly.

The Executive Board has already promised to pay for the appointment of new lecturers for programs that show an exceptional growth. It involves a total of five full-time appointments. Biomedical Engineering and Innovation Sciences will probably be treated to a new lecturer, since both programs are expected to grow more than forty percent. But Rector Hans van Duijn says that a program like Mechanical Engineering (+36.2 percent) is also being considered by the Executive Board.

According to the Rector, departments have been invited to submit their long-term plans some time ago already. The plans should make clear how departments expect to handle possible growth, and how they’ll cope with a possible shrinkage. So far, the Executive Board has received only a single multi-year plan, submitted by Applied Mathematics. The board hopes to be able to distill a format from that plan, for other departments to use.

The task force advises lecturers to ‘opt for didactic methods that don’t or hardly require much-used lecture rooms’. To that end, money from the Bachelor College budget has been put aside. Web lectures are one of the possible alternatives. Lectures should be able to be looped in high quality, too.

Proposals to move lectures to off-campus venues like Pathé cinema or the Effenaar have not been included in the memo. Van Duijn says he’s doesn’t like the idea. “There’s no way to take notes properly, for example.”