Case Study #5: Two-Year Course Plan / Perpetual Schedule Alignment

ISSUE:

If an institution has committed to developing and publishing academic guided pathways for its students, then commensurate with this commitment is the scheduling of courses each semester that abide by that obligation in the form of a two-year course plan. There must be a process created that provides the necessary foundation for all guided pathways.

SOLUTION:

A key step in the solution to this issue is the creation of a Two-Year Course Plan, sometimes called a Perpetual Schedule. This is a commitment by each discipline and division to offer a selected number of courses in a defined, repeatable manner across a typical two-year schedule (fall/odd year, spring/even year, fall/even year, spring/odd year) to ensure that if a student is following a guided pathway, they are assured that the courses needed will be offered in the given semester. Linking back to the previous case study, an institution’s approved Two-Year Course Plan (Perpetual Schedule) is used to develop Guided Pathways for selected programs. But ensuring that the semester course offerings abide by this guaranteed plan requires that another automated reporting tool be generated. This tool uses both the master course schedule for the current semester and the defined perpetual schedule to determine this alignment. Below is shown a partial section of the perpetual schedule for the college. The programming behind the Excel worksheet iterates through each guaranteed course in the perpetual schedule and searches for the comparable course offering in the current semester. If the course is found, a YES is returned in the row, and if the course is not found a NO is returned. For the case below, the schedule for Spring/Even Year is considered. This tool also provides both the Location (if a college has multiple campuses) and the School or Division through which the course is offered. This makes it easy to filter the results by these parameters. Of course, if true to the Perpetual Schedule, there should be only YES responses from this tool. The analysis is executed from the “Run Missing Sections Check” button.