By Danielle Faucett, Associate Registrar, University of Missouri – St. Louis
In a packed Monday morning session at the 108th AACRAO Annual meeting, Jessica Lansing, Associate Registrar, and Ashley DeSantis, Assistant Registrar, from the University at Albany spoke about the importance of creating a balanced schedule that centered on the students and their learning experience. As an R1 research institution with four campuses (including the e-tech campus), they shared experiences that led them to create a more balanced schedule by developing a Business Intelligence platform for scheduling. Focusing primarily on scheduling conflicts that led to student issues, they spoke about recommendations for meeting patterns, and how faculty preference caused a majority of classes to be scheduled at the same time. This was an issue after assigning rooms because if a course was not able to be scheduled in a room, or “unroomed” as they referred to it, by the time the schedule was posted, the course would be canceled. Their target was to minimize the number of courses that were “unroomed” by balancing the schedule to spread out and accommodate more courses. While they had scheduling guidelines in place already that provided the leverage they needed to push back about certain scheduling choices, they found that after a few semesters, it had not moved the bar and courses were still in primetime. They had the vision to flatten the schedule of classes by changing the scheduling process from faculty-centered to student-centered and worked with their IR department to create a way to provide data visualization to outline the issues at hand.
Three-Phase Rollout
Training Users
Rollout to Schedulers
Ongoing Updates and Modifications
This venture led to adding new time zones and changing the entire scheduling process at their institution, which was a success. They saw movement in the right direction as their section was unable to be roomed after initial optimization decreased since the fall of 2019.
Recommendations for others looking to do the same at their institutions include:
- Providing different visualizations to help departments understand their data
- Communicating often
- Garnering support from the Provost’s Office,
- Generating buy-in by asking for feedback
- Working with departments individually.
For the University at Albany, they plan to continue reassessing and modifying this process to ensure that they are continuing to move in the right direction, starting with improving the data load speed for their Business Intelligence platform for scheduling.