AMP Strategic Scheduling Working Group (Spring 2023)

Charge from the Provost

Strategic scheduling provides students with the ability to plan while maximizing fill rates and teaching workload and supporting the university’s need to plan and manage the academic mission.  

Objective

Develop scheduling guidelines and tools that prioritize student retention and graduation rates while maximizing faculty teaching load and course fill-rate to achieve multi-year planning and reduce redundancies in the schedule.  

• Create a timeline for addressing low-enrolled courses to ensure greater consistency and equity across schools and departments.
• Determine criteria for eliminating courses from the Catalog that have not been regularly scheduled.
• Create a process for multi-year scheduling with critical dates, metrics, and tools.
• Develop training packages to be utilized by Faculty Affairs to assist chairs and other school committees and personnel in conducting multi-year scheduling.
• Develop guidelines to promote consistency and equity across departments and schools with regards to teaching load. 
• Recommend how to support graduate course scheduling with evening campus services and supports (Consider centralizing departmental evening offerings so that critical mass is attained and services can efficiently be provided).
• Suggest time blocks in which classes can be scheduled–lower division, upper division, FLCs, etc–in order to minimize conflicts, guide student expectations, and allow students to make scheduling changes.
• Provide feedback on the integrated first-year experience block enrollment initiative.

Strategic Scheduling Driving Questions: 

• How do we develop a schedule that maximizes teaching load and fill rate with the primary objective of meeting all the needs that students have for achieving timely graduation?
• How do we ensure that our course schedules fit with our public liberal arts and sciences identity while maximizing use of resources?
• By better utilizing our core learning spaces, how do we ensure that our course scheduling is efficient?
• How can strategic scheduling and student support resources help with retention and graduation rates? 
• How can strategic scheduling help with multi-year planning and budgeting?
• Can strategic scheduling be a first step in multi-year scheduling? If so, how?
• How can strategic scheduling help to reduce redundancies in the schedule (e.g. multiple research methods or too many of the same GE area being offered)?

AMP Strategic Scheduling Working Group Recommendations Report

Opportunities for feedback:

• Thursday, January 19th, 2023: Faculty Retreat 
• Monday, February 6th, 2023 12:00 -1:00pm: Open-forum for campus on Strategic Scheduling

Presentations & Conversations:

• Faculty Retreat Conversation; AMP Strategic Scheduling
• Open Forum; Strategic Scheduling 2/6/2023

Membership:

Co-Chairs	Julie Wood & Mike Visser
A&H Faculty	Tim Wandling
B&E Faculty	Krista Altaker (At-Large)
EDU Faculty	Paula Lane
S&T Faculty	Martha Shott
Soc. Sci. Faculty	Karin Jaffe
LIB	Mark Perri (At-Large)
Assoc. Students	TBD
Staff Rep	Kathryn Atwood
Dean	Elisabeth Wade
Scheduler	Dennis Goss
APARC Rep	Emily Acosta Lewis
Staff to the Working Group	Vivi Yang