Case Study #6: Multi-Semester Course Scheduling Database

ISSUE:

Curriculum Committees often are tasked with determining whether a course should be removed from the catalog if it appears to have no continuing value to the institution. This may be because of decreased enrollment or the reconstitution of a particular program of study. In addition, when developing a perpetual schedule (see a previous case study above) it is important to know the historical offerings of a course by semester to identify the most appropriate schedule to fit students’ needs. Both of these exercises require a comprehensive chronological course scheduling database as a reference, which is often difficult or time-consuming to collect in a timely manner to support decision-making.

SOLUTION:

This Excel database was created from historical course offering data over several semesters extracted from the institution’s archived ERP class scheduling system. A worksheet containing all class sections (offered, pending, cancelled) for every desired semester was created. A navigation dashboard was developed to allow the user to quickly extract all section instances over this time period for a given course (prefix & number). The purpose of this workbook is to instantly determine all historical offerings of a course, including instructor as well as final enrollments. This tool will support multiple tasks, including scheduling sections for the current semester, determining the last semester for which a course was offered (if looking to remove a course from the catalog), and the proposal of a perpetual schedule for a course, among others. The image below shows the dashboard page of the workbook for a sample course; the only user inputs are the Discipline Prefix and Discipline Course Number for the course.