An Update on the Academic Scheduling Project
In the spring and summer, a team was assembled from across the Vermont State Colleges to review and select a software product to support the Vermont State University’s academic scheduling needs. Past scheduling practices have been largely based on rolling over the past terms’ offerings and making minor adjustments. Demand-based course scheduling practices will be critical to ensure students have access to the courses they need at their location, including online. We are taking a data-driven approach to course scheduling, with the goal of increasing the ability of students to access courses when they need them so they can stay on track for graduation, to manage scheduling effectively across multiple locations and modalities, and to help improve the financial sustainability of the system.
Ad Astra has been selected as our vendor partner to do this work, as it will meet the need to build more effective and efficient processes and to better understand and forecast the course section needs of our students. The implementation project will be hands-on, and the team will work to schedule courses for the Fall 2023 term.
Some goals of the project include:
- Building a more student-focused term schedule that allows students to move seamlessly through their course program
- Reducing the number of human hours required to build a term schedule
- Creating a more user-friendly scheduling process and platform
You can learn more about the project scope, timeline, and project team, by reviewing the project charter.