About the Webconference
College leaders often struggle to fully appreciate students’ scheduling needs and oftentimes feel like they have little idea of the courses that students want or when they want them. The daunting task of planning for student demand while balancing logistic limitations leads many colleges to simply replicate their previous year’s calendar.
Nearly half of community college students work more than 20 hours per week, and they are more than twice as likely to be parents than their peers in four-year institutions. The extra life-demands placed on community college students means that trying to accommodate inflexible and often unpredictable course offerings is frustrating, and at times even impossible. For these students, scheduling barriers reflect more than simply a procedural headache and can act as a serious barrier to long-term success.
This resource is part of the Design Student-Centered Guided Pathways to Achieve Strategic Goals Roadmap. Access the Roadmap for stepwise guidance with additional tools and research.
As a result of unpredictable schedules or course bottlenecks, students are often forced to delay progress through their program, resulting in excess credit accumulation and deferred completion. If colleges can remove some of these barriers to scheduling, they can encourage rather than impede students’ progress.
Pathways-reform efforts present an opportunity to make the schedule more predictable for both students and faculty. Drawing a clear academic plan for students from enrollment to graduation makes scheduling habits easier to predict, allowing administrators to schedule courses further in advance and with greater reliability.
Due to capacity constraints, even when colleges redistribute instructor and space resources to best meet student demand, there are still some students who are unable to register for courses they need. Most institutions have ad hoc or one-off ways to prioritize student registration, but failing to systematically respond to increased demand can create enrollment bottlenecks and delay students’ progress.
Join this webconference to learn best practices for creating schedules that prioritize course availability based on student completion. This presentation is meant for presidents, provosts and VPs of academic affairs or student affairs.