Can Shared Learning Facilities Reduce Educational Inefficiency Evidence from Practice-Intensive Programs

Abstract

This study investigates whether shared learning facilities can reduce educational inefficiency in practice-intensive programs that rely on specialized rooms, equipment, instructor guidance, and repeated hands-on activities. The study is designed to collect data from approximately 45 practice-intensive programs across 12 higher education institutions over two academic semesters, including around 14,000 facility-booking records, 8,500 equipment-use logs, 5,200 supervised practice records, 3,600 learner waiting-time records, 1,200 student survey responses, and 180 administrator interviews or coordination notes. Key variables include facility utilization rate, idle-time ratio, booking success rate, peak-hour congestion, average waiting time, equipment availability, learner access frequency, course completion continuity, perceived access fairness, and satisfaction with facility support. The study applies data envelopment analysis, queueing analysis, propensity score matching, difference-in-differences analysis, and multilevel regression to compare programs before and after shared-use policy implementation and to examine whether shared facilities improve resource efficiency and learner access. Evaluation indicators include utilization improvement rate, idle-time reduction, conflict reduction, waiting-time decrease, access equity index, and learning continuity score. The innovation of this study lies in moving beyond general discussion of resource shortage and providing empirical evidence on whether shared facility governance can reduce educational inefficiency, improve access fairness, and support sustainable operation in programs with high resource dependency