Since the last post in this series, most of our team and I have been heavily involved in hosting our annual Users’ Conference. This year’s conference was an excellent opportunity to catch up with early adopters and prospective users of the approaches referred to in the last post. Unanimously, the feedback on rolling out these solutions focused on the following points:

• There is limited available information regarding the specific course needs of active students
• Mission-critical efforts to improve student outcomes (retention and graduation rates) are compromised by a this lack of information
• The significant strategic opportunities and potential cultural ramifications of student-specific course needs information

Since the first two points have been addressed in previous posts, let’s focus on the strategic and cultural issues related to academic program capacity management.

Strategically, the availability of student-specific information creates the following opportunities:

• Decision-support information for academic departments regarding course offerings for an upcoming term
• Support for short and long-term faculty hiring plans
• Identification of course bottlenecks (required courses with the fewest available seats) for each academic program
• The understanding of the capacity of each academic program to effectively accommodate new students (derived from the capacity of its bottleneck courses)

The feedback that we have received is that the following cultural implications should be considered:

• Campus initiatives to improve student services or become more student-centered get a major, tangible boost
• Expectation management regarding the speed and magnitude of change (e.g., only a small percentage of the academic schedule representing "high-impact moves" will be addressed each term) is critical to promote faculty buy-in
• An institution-wide, versus department by department, perspective and senior administrative buy-in are critical in creating a “culture of evidence”

Join me again next week when I’ll discuss early adopters of these approaches and the future of academic program capacity management.