CAQA Digital / An Institution That Cannot Stop

A change made mid teaching period costs several times more

The same work carries very different costs depending on where in the cycle it lands.

The cost difference is not mysterious. During a teaching period, every hour a staff member spends learning something new is an hour taken from work that has a hard deadline attached to a learner's progress. Every error made while learning affects a real person's enrolment, results or support, and correcting it takes far longer than avoiding it would have. The pressure to revert to the old way is intense because the old way is known to work and there is no time to discover whether the new way does. Half the intended change is quietly abandoned in the first fortnight.

There is a second and less obvious cost, which is the effect on the change itself. People learning under time pressure learn the minimum required to get through the day. They do not explore, they do not adopt the parts that would have made their work genuinely easier, and they carry forward whatever partial understanding got them through the first week. That partial understanding then becomes the institutional norm, and the difference between what was possible and what is actually used never closes.

None of this argues that mid period work is never justified. Sometimes a problem cannot wait, and sometimes a small change is genuinely small. The argument is that the multiplier should be acknowledged in the decision rather than discovered afterwards. If a piece of work is being pushed into a busy window for scheduling convenience, the real cost of that convenience should be stated to whoever is approving it, in plain terms, before the decision is made.