Instructional Planning Collaborative

The collaborative kicks off in February. Fill out the form below to sign up.

Higher education institutions are facing growing pressure to make more deliberate choices about how limited academic resources are used. Yet course offerings, faculty assignments, workload practices, and other academic resource decisions often change more slowly than student demand and institutional priorities.

The Instructional Planning Collaborative will help academic leaders identify where resources may be misaligned with demand and build the processes needed to translate those insights into more intentional decisions about course offerings, faculty capacity, and instructional spending.

Challenges to Making Progress

• Historical academic practices can outlast the conditions that created them. Course schedules, staffing arrangements, and workload practices may remain in place even as enrollment, student demand, and institutional priorities change.
• Academic efficiency is too often conflated with cost cutting. Institutions need to distinguish unintentional inefficiencies from intentional investments in priorities such as student progression, academic quality, research, mission, or strategic growth.
• Data alone cannot tell leaders what to do. Academic efficiency analyses can surface potential opportunities, but leaders still need a consistent way to evaluate tradeoffs and incorporate institutional context.
• It is difficult to implement changes in how resources are used to support the academy. Course scheduling and faculty utilization intersect with curriculum, shared governance processes, workload expectations, institutional policies, and longstanding practices, requiring clear decision processes and thoughtful stakeholder engagement.

About the Collaborative

The Instructional Planning Collaborative helps academic leaders develop a sustainable approach to assessing and improving how instructional resources are used.

Through four expert-led virtual workshops, participants will learn how to conduct core academic efficiency analyses, identify potential opportunities to increase efficiency in course delivery and faculty capacity, and develop the frameworks, processes, and roadmaps they will need to act on those findings once their analyses are complete.

The goal is not to maximize efficiency or minimize academic spending. Participants will identify how to weigh financial considerations alongside student needs, academic quality, mission, research, growth, and other institutional priorities so that resources are used intentionally.

The Collaborative will help you:

• Establish a framework for academic resource tradeoffs that reflects your institution’s financial needs, student demand, mission, academic priorities, and strategic goals.
• Identify potential academic efficiency opportunities by assessing underfilled sections, small courses, faculty instructional capacity, and adjunct and overload use.
• Build a roadmap for a more sustainable course-planning process that incorporates demand, resource implications, academic considerations, stakeholder input, and principled exceptions.
• Develop a framework for future faculty-capacity and staffing decisions that connects instructional needs to workload, course releases, adjunct and overload use, and opportunities to redeploy capacity.
• Prepare to move from analysis to action with clear roles, decision points, stakeholder-engagement practices, and processes for evaluating and implementing future opportunities.

Build Your Academic Efficiency Strategy Through Four Expert-Led Workshops 

What to Expect

Each 90-minute virtual session will combine expert guidance with opportunities to discuss challenges, approaches, and lessons with peers from other institutions. Participants will receive tools and frameworks they can adapt to their institutional context and use as their academic efficiency work progresses.

Participating institutions may also request one-on-one consultation with EAB between sessions to troubleshoot questions related to their analyses, institutional context, or implementation planning.

Sessions

• Thursday, February 4, 2027 | 1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time
• Thursday, March 4, 2027 | 1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time
• Thursday, April 8, 2027 | 1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time
• Thursday, May 6, 2027 | 1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time

How to Participate

Using the form below, please nominate two academic leaders to participate in the Collaborative:

1. Executive Sponsor (ES): Provides leadership-level sponsorship, establishes the institutional purpose and priorities for the work, and supports the Implementation Leader in moving the work forward on campus. Suggested role: Provost.
2. Implementation Leader (IL): Participates in the Collaborative alongside the Executive Sponsor and helps coordinate the institution’s academic efficiency work, including engaging relevant stakeholders, facilitating or conducting analyses, and translating Collaborative guidance into the institution’s planning processes. Suggested roles: Associate or Assistant Provost or another leader reporting directly to the Provost with responsibility for academic affairs, planning, institutional effectiveness, or related work.

We strongly encourage Executive Sponsors to attend the first session, which sets the goals, priorities, and decision framework that will guide the institution’s subsequent work. Implementation Leaders should plan to participate throughout the four-session Collaborative.

If you are not yet a partner, learn more about Strategic Advisory Services.