Instructor Preferences, Course Relationships, and Approval Workflows: Optimized and Automated

Optimizing and automating your scheduling process for faculty preferences and student needs helps reduce administrator workload. Learn how automated approval workflows can help you achieve your goals and meet stakeholder needs.

Optimize Your Schedule for Instructor Preferences

Rather than playing email tag, using paper forms, or struggling with Excel spreadsheets to determine what times, days, and rooms work best for instructors, your scheduling platform should automatically provide you with this information. A scheduling software should ideally help you with the following items:

• It allows all preferences to be taken into account (days, times, class room types, equipment needed).
• Those preferences allow the computer program (algorithm) to take them into account when building the schedule.
• Then, if (or when) conflicts arise after you build the initial schedule, the software can take into account the preferences to find the best fit for any changes that are needed.

Offer the Right Courses and Sections at the Right Times

The same is true for optimizing scheduling for courses with sections. The ability to specify relationships between courses and sections ensures course offerings are best aligned to student needs. For example, you want to make sure co-requisites happen at different times, or maybe you want general education requirements to all happen at the same time.

Implement Automated Workflows to Streamline Processes

Scheduling is also about workflows. (If you’re a professional school, this is a big one for you.) A unified scheduling platform should offer a workflow engine that allows your administrators to replicate campus workflows by designating stakeholders and their relevant permissions. This dynamic workflow construction tool can then automatically route the right form to the right person. Easy peasy.

Embrace End-to-End Scheduling to Meet Student Needs

Although we’ve talked about optimizing for instructor preferences, scheduling is ultimately about meeting your students’ needs and contributing to their success. For many institutions, this mean broadening their understanding of the scheduling process to include not just rooms, but also courses, policies, preferences, approval workflows, exceptions, last-minute changes, and analytics.

We believe the way to accomplish this is with a comprehensive scheduling platform, one that aligns and automates all the components of the scheduling process to meet the needs of all stakeholders, especially current (and potential) students. We also believe that the role of the registrar is changing to one of empowerment, innovation, and enablement. End-to-end scheduling can be a big contributor to this evolution.