Courses currently have a "Student Capacity" to limit student enrollment but do not have an "Instructor Capacity" to limit instructor enrollment. This can create situations where too many instructors sign up, which in turn can create problems wherein too many instructors show up and have nothing to do, or can create create additional work for course leaders to reach out to instructors and ask them to cancel. Either way, it creates an awkward situation in an organization where we want to gratefully encourage as much volunteering as we can.

Note that it is possible set limits on the number of instructors for course field trips, but not for the number of instructors for the course itself.

For example, this happened recently for the Seattle Snowshoe "Backcountry Snowshoeing Skills Instructor Clinic" held on January 30, 2016. This was a small clinic intended to have a max of 8 students and 2 instructors. The instructor team was fully specified as of October, 2015, but other well-intentioned instructors signed up so that at one point we had 5 instructors signed up to teach 2 students. This led to lots of churn among the instructors as they noticed the high instructor-to-student ratio and started cancelling. We eventually ended up with the desired instructor count of 2, but with a completely different set of instructors than had been set in October. Situations like this could be prevented if it were possible to simply set a max Instructor Capacity.