Appendices

This chapter contains appendices necessary for the utilization and interpretation of research presented in this premier reference source.

Management of Learning Space

Dr. Villez looks up from her papers and sighs as her e-mail beeps again for what seems the 100th time this morning with yet another incoming mail message. She checks the subject line and sender—yes, it is from another student in one of her online courses. She sighs again. She has barely started reading the last assignment that came in 20 minutes ago, and here is yet another assignment being turned in that needs to be graded and feedback given to the student as soon as possible. Dr. Villez looks at her watch and then back at her pile of e-mail. She might need to rethink her agreement to participate in her institution’s online programs. The online courses were taking so much of her time; it was beginning to cut into her time for scholarship. There are a multitude of reasons why an institution may elect to engage in distance education (Oblinger, Barone, & Hawkins, 2001). One of those reasons might be to generate greater revenues and to expand its access. With projections that an estimated 15% of all students in higher education will be engaged in distance education (International Data Corporation, 1999), the related pressures on faculty can become enormous. While these reasons may have a basis in institutional survival and transformation, the implications may come at a cost to those who must deliver the instruction through greater teaching loads and class sizes.

E-Scheduling

Collaboration between business partners can take many forms, ranging from simple exchange of elementary data to collaborative work on product development and division of labor in production and distribution processes. This article describes concepts, systems, and experiences with computer-aided collaborative scheduling. Scheduling is the allocation of resources over time to perform a collection of tasks (Ba ker, 1974). A schedule maps activities to resources, together with their planned start and end times. It determines what activities will be realized with what resources at what time. Scheduling is traditionally seen primarily as an activity geared to a specific workshop or factory. Increased division of labor and globalization of manufacturing activities demand the coordination of distributed production activities. As scheduling decisions are often short term and taken close to execution, real-time information ex change, seamless task collaboration, and contingency management among geographically dispersed factories may be beneficial (Jia, Fuh, Nee, & Zhang, 2002).

Input from Users

The main objectives of this chapter are to present useful and practical time management hints from users that were surveyed and to identify user difficulties with the current electronic time management or calendar tools and users’ desired calendar features. Consistent with the main findings from our large survey with students, faculty, and staff members in a U.S. public research university (see Chapter 10), additional data collected from open-ended questions with the same user population also reflect the reality that users are experiencing dynamic time management demands, and demonstrate how they respond to these demands and problems of meeting deadlines. Users’ input on time management hints indicate again that an effective time manager is also a good temporal structure manipulator. The key strategies offered by the users for effective time management are (1) plan in advance, (2) prioritize tasks, (3) control time, (4) stop procrastination, (5) understand temporal structure relationships, and (6) communicate and coordinate time with others. These strategies are interpreted from a temporal structure point of view respectively in this chapter.

What is the Relationship between the Quality of Individual Time Management and Temporal Structure Usage? Building and Testing a Research Model

This chapter introduces the research model designed for this study. A test of the measurement model is presented in detail. The software utilized in this research is the PLS-Graph version 3.0. A partial least square (PLS) data analysis was run on students, faculty, and staff datasets respectively. This chapter also reports all results on the building of the structural model that represents the relationship between time management quality and understanding of temporal structures. PLS results for students, faculty, and staff members are reported respectively. This chapter also summarizes the differences among students, faculty, and staff in their capture, use and understanding of different types of temporal structures.

Investigating Temporal Structure Usage in Individual Time Management Practices

Researchers in management and organizational behavior have shown that temporal rhythms and norms exist and that they collectively impact multiple aspects of an organization. They have also shown that individual productivity is hampered if temporal cycles clash. This suggests that individual time management is related to the temporal structures that govern and constrain an individual’s life. At its simplest form, individuals use external records to capture explicit temporal structures that allow them to view this constraint. This external record then allows individuals to view the relationships between the temporal structures affecting their lives and the relationships between the different temporal structures. Thus, knowing these relationships can help an individual build a personal schedule in a calendar tool that optimizes his or her use of time while still abiding by the temporal structures that cannot be controlled. It is expected that people who are very busy or very interested in personal advancement want to optimize their time usage and, therefore, spend time learning about the myriad of temporal structures that affect their lives so that they can best control them. It follows that people who are effective time managers are likely to use and understand temporal structures in a more sophisticated fashion than people who are not. This research investigates this possibility through two sets of intensive field interviews with a group of academic professionals at a U.S. public research university. The focus of this work is on investigating types of temporal structures being used in individual time management with calendar tools.

Identifying what Constitutes the Quality of Individual Time Management and How Individuals Process Temporal Structure Information

The purpose of this book is to provide useful user requirements for capturing and designing more extensive temporal structures within the current electronic calendar systems through a series of in-depth user studies. Chapter 5 presents the study results of two in-depth interviews with twenty professionals for identifying what types of temporal structures are being used in personal time management practices and possible design implications to further design the current electronic calendar tools. In order to deepen our understanding of how individual time management quality is related to the various temporal structures, it is necessary to conduct a much larger scale user study to further support the findings reported in Chapter 5. If we could possibly obtain solid support from a larger user study, we would be more confident to state that we need to enhance the design of the current electronic calendar systems through incorporating more extensive temporal structure features.

Calendar Tools

The focus of this chapter is to review electronic time management or calendar tools. This review is presented to support the underlying motivation for this book, which is to improve time management by providing better electronic time management or calendar tools that incorporate more types of temporal structures than those being managed with existing tools. The chapter begins with a discussion of paper-based calendars, which have served as the primary structure for representing time usage for all subsequent time management aids. This discussion relates time management practices to the types of temporal structures the paper calendar manipulates and to the paper calendar successor, the electronic calendar. A comparison is made between the advantages of paper-based tools and electronic tools to illustrate the types of advantages that were moving to electronic means. This comparison is also made to illustrate that the advantages developed for the electronic time manager are simplistic and somewhat obvious, such as simplifying repeated entries and announcing time-based events.

Time Management and Temporal Personalities

Personal productivity is achieved through an effective time management practice. Due to the advancement of modern telecommunication and information technologies, today’s professionals are taxed with more and more tasks and given shorter time periods to complete them than before. Companies strive to push their new products to the market in order to gain as much profit as possible in the shortest period. Time is regarded as a primary factor to measure both personal and organizational successes. First, time management tactics in practice and some suggested hints for improving time management are introduced. In the existing literature, time management research is scant in that time is a fairly complicated concept with many variables involved in different contexts. In order to provide some theoretical foundation in this area, some empirical time management research is reviewed and four key constructs are identified to measure the quality of individual time management: planning, meeting deadlines, sensing a lack of time control and engaging in procrastination behavior. To further understand how individuals perceive time, psychological aspects of time are also explored, particularly focusing on individuals’ time urgency and time perspective, which indicates individuals’ perceptions on the passage of time and future time. These perceptions support how individuals exhibit meeting their deadlines and engaging in procrastination behaviors, and therefore, can be used to identify whether time managers are effective or not.

Understanding Time and its Relationship to Individual Time Management

Time never has been an easy concept, since each of us has different time perceptions and experiences. Individual time management stories can vary dramatically because of a variety of reasons, such as different backgrounds, professions, social roles, cultures, gender and so on. The main focus of this book is on socially-constructed time, which demonstrates how humans interact with time in their social contexts. This perspective of time provides a good basis to understand how individuals experience time and furthermore manage their time. This chapter introduces the concept of time based on prior time research and its related concepts. First, it describes how difficult it is to interpret what time is and how scientists in different disciplines explain the nature of time.