The rapidly changing college environment necessitates a course scheduling process that’s equal parts creativity and innovation. Through collaboration with Ad Astra, these frontline higher education professionals are employing thoughtful strategies to enhance and streamline their institution’s scheduling process, ensuring student success today and in the future.
Innovator:
Chris Patera, Director: Academic Operations
Institution: Central Piedmont Community College, Charlotte, NC
The Challenge: Roll Forward Scheduling
In the past, we were rolling forward base offerings each term and making decisions to add/delete using historical data, predictive trends, and student requests to inform scheduling.
The Innovation: Using Ad Astra’s section scheduling capabilities, we are now able to enhance our historical information with data from Ad Astra to back-up our decision-making process.
Why Ad Astra:
We have a 25+ year relationship with Ad Astra. Its products allow Central Piedmont Community College the ability to present and make data-informed solutions that benefit our scheduling process and by proxy our students. 
Innovator:
Jill Loveless, Ph.D., Provost
Institution: West Virginia Northern Community College, Wheeling, WV
The Challenge: Faculty-centered scheduling
Before revising our approach, we were scheduling using Excel documents and email and then fine-tuning details with faculty and scheduling chairs. This often resulted in building a schedule for faculty wishes, rather than student needs.
The Innovation: Ad Astra software allows us to create a more efficient scheduling process and to improve the ability to share information about courses between divisions.
Why Ad Astra:
We knew there had to be an easier way to improve information sharing between divisions. Ad Astra offers us the flexibility to build the schedule quickly and more efficiently than ever before. Internal communication has also improved and it’s easy to edit and access reporting.
Section Scheduling from Ad Astra gives you the power to edit sections within the same interface that provides course recommendations. Section Scheduling’s intuitive interface and collaboration tools clear the way for building a student-centric schedule.
Make edits to sections based on historical and predictive demand analytics in the same platform
View real-time updates to sections during the editing process
Stay up to date with your colleagues by using the collaboration tool
Give all departments visibility into the course schedule
Innovator:
Jay Johnson, Ed.D., Associate Provost
Institution: Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, MO
The Challenge: Manual, asynchronous processes
We were using MS Excel, which has some great features, but the process is cumbersome and solely based on human efficiency. There is also a sense of urgency created by multiple offices that makes coordination of this effort difficult.
The Innovation: We now have a centralized system through Ad Astra that allows real-time schedule edits with a simple collaboration and interface, making the executive secretary’s and registrar’s jobs more about validation, rather than checking for errors.
Why Ad Astra:
We like Ad Astra’s willingness to work on solutions that fit our needs, and also their willingness to inform us of what other institutions like ours are doing for best practices. Ad Astra is user friendly and it’s easy to add people to our processes as needed.
