The Guide to Modernizing Your Academic Operations

As educational institutions strive to fulfill their mission of driving positive student outcomes while optimizing resources, administrators are increasingly focusing on how to run efficient, student-centric academic operations. The emerging field of academic operations is rapidly gaining its rightful recognition as the crux of university operations in our technologically advancing world.

Academic operations encompass all of the foundational processes and policies that enable institutions to deliver educational programs. These processes are not only key to delivering on an institution’s educational mission, but efficient academic operations are also critical to learner success, persistence, and completion (AACRAO). 

Numerous functions fall within the scope of academic operations. While each institution will organize the various functions distinctly, AACRAO defines academic operations as:

• Curriculum management
• Syllabi management
• Catalog management
• Classroom space management
• Class scheduling
• Credential audit and completion processing
• Class registration
• Institutional and/or programmatic accreditation 

Current barriers in academic operations impact students, according to 90% of respondents to AACRAO’s most recent survey, which polled over 280 institutions on how they operate and support academic operations. Modernized academic operations are critical to ensure that students can access the courses they need, understand curricular requirements, and navigate curricular and institutional policies. 

90% of higher ed leaders agree that barriers in academic operations impact students

Higher education leaders are seeing the benefits of moving from siloed, manual processes to an integrated academic operations ecosystem where the various components of academic operations are managed in one platform. Evidence-based research shows that this holistic approach to academic operations promotes increased efficiency and access to real-time data for informed decision-making, leading to improved student outcomes and better stewardship of financial resources. An integrated academic operations platform works by securing a two-way, real time integration with an institution’s SIS and mapping relevant curricular and scheduling data so staff can analyze the data and take action within the same platform. 

Benefits of a holistic approach to academic operations: 

• Increased efficiency 
• Enhanced data accessibility for decision making 
• Improved student outcomes 
• Optimized resource allocation

This white paper will walk through Curriculum, Scheduling, and Assessment, the three major components of academic operations, and the functions that fall under each category. It will also explore the interrelatedness of these functions, how they’ve been managed traditionally, and how they can be managed within a modernized platform to better support institutions in fulfilling their missions. 

Curriculum

The curriculum of an institution consists of all of the academic offerings available to students. The programs of study and majors define and greatly influence how the public views the institution as well as whether prospective students elect to apply and enroll there. The different functions within this category, catalog and syllabi as well as curriculum management and analytics are all intrinsically linked. 

The four functions of curriculum: 

• Curriculum management 
• Catalog 
• Syllabi 
• Curriculum analytics

For example, curricular information and current syllabi fed into a dynamic catalog helps to maintain accuracy and a strong online presence that can boost a university’s ranking in online searches. Consequently, a catalog can double as a marketing opportunity for programs at an institution, alongside its more recognized role as an academic source of truth for students and advisors. 

Curriculum Management

Curriculum management is the process of how a higher education institution oversees the creation and modification of curriculum. This ongoing function requires institutions to maintain an accurate repository of all their curricular offerings. Curricular modifications can range from updating a course description to proposing a whole new degree program. All faculty member proposals to update curricular offerings or add new curricula are subject to a review process that involves approval by multiple individuals and committees.

Traditional Curriculum Management Practices

While the nuances differ among institutions, the process of managing curriculum has traditionally been fragmented and labor-intensive. Proposal forms were shuttled via emails, documented on spreadsheets, or stored in online folders. Beyond the obvious administrative burden, tracking was nearly impossible. Without knowledge of the current stage of a proposal, there was no way to oversee or expedite the process. This lack of accountability or enforcement mechanisms led to unnecessarily long turnover times for review and approval.  

‍

Such delays are detrimental to students who require up-to-date information to make decisions critical to their success at the institution. Unfortunately, students are often unaware of changes made to the curriculum that may impact them, according to 62% of recently-polled university leaders.

62% of university leaders report that students are often unaware of changes made to the curriculum that may impact them

While methods are beginning to shift, 4 in 10 institutions still use outdated manual processes to manage curriculum changes, according to the latest AACRAO academic operations survey. Specifically, 42% of institutions report they rely on emails to manage the curriculum change process while 39% rely on electronic spreadsheets. 

Moving to a Centralized Curriculum Management Ecosystem

By housing all curricular information within an academic operations platform, institutions are now able to maintain a single source of truth and collect, review, and approve all of their proposals in one place. This allows them to avoid disparities that arise from collecting and reviewing this information across multiple locations, such as forms and emails.

Forms and workflows allow administrators to standardize the process. Faculty submitting a proposal are guided to include all the necessary data thanks to standardized forms. Workflows then keep the submission moving along by routing them through the appropriate approval steps, which helps save time and creates transparency for where a proposal is at any given time. The curriculum is automatically updated within the institution’s repository, ensuring programs and courses are always accurate and up-to-date. Using this central repository also allows institutions to pull this data directly into the catalog, ensuring consistency between locations and avoiding errors due to manual entry. 

Failure to sync curricular data has been shown to negatively impact students who, for example, need to know course requirements to successfully complete their programs. In a survey of over 200 university leaders, 48% said curriculum changes are not always accurately reflected on program maps, completion audits, the website, or other student-facing sources. 

Catalog

The catalog, also sometimes referred to as a handbook, is the public repository of the most up-to-date curricular offerings and policies of an institution. Comparable to a contract between the institution and students, this guide is the primary source students rely on to understand academic offerings, requirements, and expectations. Therefore, it is critical that the course catalog accurately reflects an institution's curriculum and policies. 

In response to a College Pulse survey, 6 in 10 students at four-year institutions report that they use the catalog to understand degree requirements. 

Traditional Catalog & Handbook Management Practices

Historically, the catalog required significant manual work on the part of administrators. This included a labor-intensive and error-prone process of going page by page each year to update curricula or policies manually. 

‍

Currently, most institutions (84%) publish their catalog once a year, leaving limited opportunities to update the catalog with new course and program requirements. Often catalogs are either a downloadable PDF document linked out on a public-facing website or a point solution that serves as a web-based version of the PDF, both of which still require manual input of curricular changes and can easily become out of date. 

‍

Poor catalog management adds to the unexpected obstacles students must navigate on the path to degree completion. As one student shared:

“The sheer volume of courses and requirements proved overwhelming as I sifted through pages of course listings and degree regulations.”

Unclear prerequisite requirements, misinformation, or difficulty finding information can disrupt a student’s academic trajectory, throwing off their plans for subsequent terms. This can prolong their time to completion or even discourage students from moving forward on their certificate or degree.

Catalog Management within a Modernized Academic Operations Ecosystem

An academic operations platform connects the online catalog directly to the institution’s curriculum management system, which helps prevent institutions from publishing inconsistent or inaccurate information. Since all updates are stored in the platform, when it comes time to publish the catalog for the next year, administrators can automatically publish newly approved changes without going manually page by page to update it, and potentially leaving out changes. This both reduces errors and saves a considerable amount of time for administrators.

Since students and advisors heavily rely on the catalog, it is advantageous that institutions have an error-free catalog that correctly reflects the same information across all functions. A modern, easy-to-navigate, online catalog also uses dynamic search functionality that creates an immersive and explorative experience for current and prospective students that goes beyond a cumbersome PDF. Students can filter their results based on areas of academic interest to easily locate the information they are seeking instead of navigating page by page or scrolling through a static PDF. 

As part of a larger academic operations ecosystem, a student-centric catalog can serve as a tool to address student success metrics, such as enrollment and completion rates. Results of a Student Voice survey showed that for 65% of students, a top consideration for their enrollment decision for a particular institution was the major/program of interest offered, demonstrating how critical it is to make curricular offerings easily available for students to explore. 

Syllabi

Syllabi provides students with key curricular and policy information at the course level, including the basics of class time, sections, locations, and exam dates. A syllabus also reveals what learning and program outcomes students can expect from a course and what is expected of them. Items such as readings, class activities, and assignments are usually covered as well as the specifics of how student progress will be evaluated, be that through exams, projects, or a thesis.

Traditional Syllabi Production Practices

The traditional means of creating an effective syllabus required significant time and effort from faculty and staff. Faculty relied on syllabi from previous terms or had to create new syllabi from scratch each term. This manual building of new syllabi or updating a former one was prone to human error and the risk that outdated information or policies were included. The large amounts of time spent formatting, chasing down policies, and inputting new information took time away from where faculty serve best— instructing and supporting students.

Modernizing Syllabi Creation within an Academic Operations Ecosystem

An integrated academic operations ecosystem allows institutions to pull course information from their curriculum and scheduling system right into syllabi. Auto-populating syllabi from an integrated academic operations ecosystem not only reduces faculty workload but also ensures that the information on their syllabi is up-to-date. This helps institutions ensure that all syllabi display accurate course and policy information that comes directly from the curriculum system. 

Customizable forms enable administrators to pre-populate key policy information at both the departmental and institution-wide level across every section. Pre-made templates provide faculty with institutional branding, formatting, and standard policies so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel each term and can spend their time on curricular content.  

Syllabus templates are also a way institutions can standardize to achieve brand consistency across fonts, colors, formatting, fields displayed, and the like. With pre-set formatting, all syllabi reflect a consistent brand identity with the catalog and other student-facing documents.

Leveraging templates and auto-populate features allows institutions to ensure that syllabi are clear, accurate, and consistent with other syllabi so students know what to expect and don’t get confused by conflicting information on other course syllabi. Academic honesty and accessibility policies are often covered in syllabi so it is critical that instructors don’t inadvertently publish inaccurate policies pulled from old syllabi.

Graphic that highlights benefits of using syllabus templates: 

• Save faculty time with pre-made templates and ability to auto-populate
• Ensure accurate policies and curricular information are displayed 
• Implement consistent institutional branding across all syllabi

Creating and storing syllabi within an academic operations platform also provides an opportunity for institutions to publish syllabi directly to the catalog, which may be required by some states or accreditors.

‍

Curriculum Analytics

Curriculum analytics help administrators understand where students struggle on their academic journey and identify high-risk points. The analysis of institutional data can provide valuable insights into student course-taking patterns and associated outcomes at various stages of the curriculum. Such information can be used to understand the impact the structure of the curriculum has on student progression toward a degree so institutions can proactively find solutions to support student retention and degree attainment. 

Traditional Curriculum Analytics Practices

Historically, institutional data has been siloed or not readily available to faculty and staff. Without access to vital information, curriculum analytics practices were piecemeal or non-existent. Additionally, faculty and staff often did not have the time or expertise needed to pull this information, interpret it, and act on it. 

Modernizing Curriculum Analytics within an Academic Operations Ecosystem

Using data from an academic operations platform, administrators can identify high-risk course combinations where students are more likely to fail. For example, administrators can compare how DFW rates differ when different courses are taken at the same time. 

Curriculum analytics also offer insight into where students are more likely to experience attrition on their academic path. Once sufficient data on student course-taking patterns are analyzed, it can be used to align essential classes and maximize students' ability to progress seamlessly through their academic plan.

Scheduling 

Scheduling is by nature a complicated process with hundreds of interdependent variables and includes academic, event, and faculty scheduling, as well as course demand projections. 

The four components of scheduling: 

• Academic scheduling 
• Course demand projections
• Faculty workload management 
• Event scheduling 

Scheduling functions pose significant potential for digital transformation within higher education. Predictive analytics, which can help institutions better predict student course demand, is one such opportunity yet to be adopted by 51% of institutions surveyed. By leveraging an integrated system that hosts all data in one place, institutions can achieve transparent scheduling based on student needs.

Academic Scheduling

The academic schedule involves a complex set of factors including which courses to offer, how many sections, the modality, location, instructor, and timing. Oftentimes this also includes coordination with academic units and department schedulers who determine what will be offered. Numerous factors contribute to when, how, where, and in what delivery modality a course is scheduled. Students are highly impacted by academic scheduling and while student-centric factors are taken into account during the scheduling process, institutional and faculty considerations often take precedence at many higher education institutions.

Faculty availability and preference were the top two factors considered when creating the schedule (89% and 78% of institutions, respectively). However, only 43% of institutions report that they assess student need. - AACRAO

Traditional Academic Scheduling Practices

Academic scheduling has traditionally been a very manual process in which administrators must build the academic schedule for all of the relevant curricular offerings each term. Typically, every department builds its own schedule then sends it to the registrar, who must input all of the information manually. One department cannot see potential conflicts with the offerings of other departments nor if too many sections are being scheduled during prime time. The result is conflicts for students, space challenges, and lots of back and forth for the registrar’s office as it works to remedy these situations under time pressure. 

When it is time for registration, students frequently encounter full classes and insufficient sections, particularly in high-demand foundational courses. Not being able to enroll in the courses they need has been shown to lead to attrition. 

According to a College Pulse study, among students who frequently experience difficulty enrolling in classes, 42% agree that they will stop attending their current school or transfer if they’re unable to enroll in the classes they need, compared to 10% of students who never experience difficulty.

Modernizing Academic Scheduling within an Academic Operations Ecosystem

An academic operations platform provides institutions with one place to build the course schedule. Academic departments can all build their schedules in one place that is accessible to the registrar’s office and other relevant units. The platform provides transparency, by tagging potential conflicts when the schedule is being built, for example. Since it automates rules that prevent violations, an academic operations platform also ensures conformity with the various scheduling policies.

Preventing course conflicts is another critical part of building the course schedule as course timing and availability determine if students are able to enroll in the classes they need to progress through their degree on-time. Unfortunately, students often encounter scenarios where two crucial courses are scheduled at the same time, forcing them to choose between required courses and delay taking certain courses until the following term. 

This predicament underscores the importance of transparent scheduling to ensure that essential classes align, thus minimizing conflicts and maximizing students' ability to progress seamlessly through their academic plan. Institutions can achieve transparent scheduling by leveraging a scheduling system that hosts all data in one place and all relevant parties can see.

“Some problems I had getting into classes were that the classes I needed were offered at the same time. So you would have to pick one or the other.”
- Student at four-year flagship university in the Northeast.

Course Demand Projections

Course demand projections leverage degree audit data to show administrators which courses students have already completed, and which ones they still need to complete. It helps institutions know the right number of sections and seats necessary to meet student needs and better allocate resources for future semesters. The use of data to project future class enrollment numbers supports institutional goals focused on advancing timely student completion. 

Traditional Course Demand Projections Practices

At many institutions, student course demand has not traditionally been a serious consideration in schedule planning. One reason is that common practices were more focused on institutional needs or faculty needs. While some institutions may value a student-centric approach, siloed student record data or a lack of sophisticated tools to analyze the data make it difficult to access projections. In either case, course allotment and scheduling decisions relied on guesswork or simply rolling over the previous year’s schedule. As a result, poor resource allocation led to too many underfilled sections in areas of low demand while other sections were consistently overfilled. 

As a result of challenges predicting course demand, class unavailability is surprisingly common at many institutions. 

6 in 10 students report that a class was already full when they tried to enroll - College Pulse

Unfortunately, consequences can be dire for students. For example, difficulties getting into prerequisite courses can delay students from taking advanced courses and completing their degree on-time. These bottleneck situations mean students may have to spend more time and money to achieve their education objectives.

“As a psychology major, I needed to enroll in an advanced research methods course to fulfill a major requirement. Unfortunately, when my registration window opened, the class was already full. This posed a significant setback for me as the research methods course was a prerequisite for several other upper-level psychology courses. Without it, I couldn't progress in my major and it jeopardized my ability to graduate on time.” - College Pulse Student Interviews

‍

Modernizing Course Demand Projections within an Academic Operations Ecosystem

Course demand data in an academic operations platform helps administrators determine what courses need to be offered, how many sections, and when they should be offered. Using real-time data from student degree audits helps administrators identify sections that are likely to be underfilled or overfilled, if changes are not made. This insight helps administrators make proactive adjustments to ensure that enough sections will be offered to meet student demand and keep students on-track. 

Faculty Workload Management

Faculty workload management takes place after academic sections have been scheduled. It is the process of organizing and distributing work assignments, such as teaching classes, among the professors and lecturers employed by the institution. Workload guidelines need to be determined depending on contract agreements and research initiatives. Properly managing faculty workload is critical as failure to do so properly has significant consequences, including regulatory requirements, faculty retention, and financial solvency for the institution. 

Traditional Faculty Workload Management Practices

Historically, department chairs managed faculty workload through a combination of spreadsheets, scheduling tools, and their SIS. Once they’d calculated the workload and determined faculty assignments, they manually imported assignments into a scheduling solution. Similar to class and event scheduling, running siloed processes makes it challenging to get a full picture of faculty workload. Faculty data is manually transferred between the SIS and scheduling tools. Additionally, a staff member has to build custom reports to understand the historical load.

Modernizing Faculty Workload Management within an Academic Operations Ecosystem

In an academic operations platform, instructor workload information is integrated allowing administrators to see instructor workload calculations while making assignments, thus avoiding overloading or underloading instructors. 

Schedulers conveniently assign instructors to sections directly in the scheduling tool, eliminating time previously spent on manually transferring data back and forth. Along with saving time, this enables a higher level of integrity as faculty needs are in better balance with what's best for students and the institution as a whole.

Administrators throughout the organization also benefit from easier access to data. No longer are they forced to figure out how to meet institutional goals based on luck and guesswork. They are also able to more easily mitigate risk involving legal and contractual requirements while effectively managing the department's budget.

‍

Event Scheduling

Event scheduling centers around space allotment for student organizations, events, department gatherings, campus receptions, and other activities on campus above and beyond regularly scheduled classes. 

Most institutions have an events team that manages the events process and closely partners with the facilities team for the actual resourcing and setup/tear-down. Being able to host events builds credibility for an institution, ensuring that the process from start to finish runs smoothly. 

Traditional Event Scheduling Practices

Typically, the events teams leverage an event-specific scheduling solution that is entirely separate from the registrar’s class scheduling solution. Often, the events team functions outside the reporting structure of the academic departments, leading to confusion on room availability and double bookings. Students who wanted to schedule extracurricular activities such as a club meeting needed to send an email, at times to an individual staff member, and wait for a response.

‍

Modernizing Event Scheduling within an Academic Operations Ecosystem

An academic operations platform allows institutions to see all events, both academic and non-academic, in one central calendar. Access to all scheduling, including classes and non-academic events, in a single location provides better transparency and room utilization. 

Managing university space in one location allows institutions to see room utilization patterns and optimize space usage. When classrooms are not in use for teaching, they can be used for faculty, staff, and student meetings, events, and alumni reunions.

Not only does a modern event scheduling system prevent underuse and conflicts in double-booking spaces, but it can also attract outside events that bring vibrancy, culture, and prestige to the college or university. Students can benefit from enriching extracurricular experiences outside their academic obligations. 

“The ability for end users to view available rooms for events directly, rather than email people to request availability, has shortened the event request and approval process substantially.”
- Dallas Baptist University

Assessment 

The assessment process evaluates how effectively courses and programs at a higher education institution drive student outcomes. Assessment information, such as learning outcomes and curriculum maps, is critical to ensure that courses and programs deliver the intended content and value. During an assessment cycle, student performance data is tracked against a set of predetermined learning outcomes and the findings can help inform improvements. Assessment is both key to driving continuous improvement and also a critical part of the accreditation process which institutions need for federal student financial aid eligibility.

Traditional Assessment Practices

In a traditional non-integrated system, the assessment plan moves between the program coordinator and assessment office several times. A first draft of the program for an upcoming school year was created by the coordinator after the compilation of faculty input, submitted for review, and sent back and forth during the editing process until final approval. Throughout the year or assessment cycle, all faculty members track the learning outcomes in this assessment plan. After the assessment cycle is completed, the program coordinator aggregates results, builds reports to show the final data, and meets with the team to discuss results and align action items. Throughout the year, staff also have to manage multiple assessment proposals across various approval processes. 

Manual input and email communication meant faculty spent considerable time on the administrative side of assessment instead of on improving the curriculum. Final end-of-cycle data that was siloed resulted in insights and recommendations rarely being put into practice. Since the assessment process requires much of the same course and program data as the functions in the curriculum category, not having information like learning outcomes accessible stymied any significant progress.

Modernizing Assessment Practices within an Academic Operations Ecosystem

An academic operations platform enables institutions to map and track learning outcomes in one place, ensuring that they are present across all programs and courses. Curriculum data is automatically transferred into assessment thus linking items to outcomes and measures. These functions help reduce the burden on faculty and administrators by eliminating the need for manual data entry, which is often prone to error. 

An integrated system ensures that your curriculum data and data from the LMS feed directly into your assessment process. This ensures that key curriculum data is visible, so leaders can make informed decisions and have accountability to move the assessment process forward. Findings are automatically aligned with action items enabling teams to act on insights directly in the curriculum management solution. These may involve curricular changes that improve student completion results. 

‍

Modernize Your Academic Operations with an Integrated Platform

Institutions that strive to foster environments conducive to student achievement can use an integrated solution to address the challenges associated with the different functions outlined above. With accessible data and streamlined processes, colleges and universities are beginning to implement strategies that expand availability for high-demand courses, enhance scheduling flexibility, and take advantage of assessment data to empower students.

Benefits of an Integrated Platform for Higher Education at a Glance

Modernized technology empowers leaders and administrators with the ability to execute data-informed, student-centric, and cost-efficient educational experiences. 

Data Accessibility

With an integrated platform, information is up-to-date and consistent across the entire system.  Students, faculty, and staff have easier access to the information they need to succeed. For example:

• Key curricular data, like learning and program outcomes, is automatically pushed into syllabi to ensure accuracy across sections and programs. 
• A dynamic online catalog maximizes access and searchability of courses, requirements, policies, and schedules for students and advisors. 
• An accessible master campus calendar features all academic and non-academic events allowing for space optimization and transparency.

Actionable Data Used to Meet Institutional Goals

Unlike in siloed systems, an integrated ecosystem helps administrators put data to good use. Examples include:

• Historical curricular and scheduling data is transformed into actionable analytics and reports.
• Configurable forms and workflows make curriculum proposals easy to efficiently manage and process.
• Academic schedules are built based on historical enrollment demand, instructor preferences, and data-based course demand projections.

Improved Allocation of Institutional Resources 

Processes that previously drained time and resources, such as formatting and file management are simplified and streamlined within a single platform. This helps reduce the number of last-minute changes that frustrate staff and discourage students. With intuitive software to facilitate tasks like syllabus creation, faculty can focus more energy on teaching or research.

Best Practices for Modernizing Your Academic Operations

Like any major initiative, modernizing academic operations is a significant undertaking. While analyzing and optimizing your institution’s academic operations takes time, commitment, collaboration, and buy-in, the good news is that it can be done incrementally. In fact, many colleges and universities discover that upgrading two or three functions makes the most sense for them, while others elect to take on a system-wide modernization.  

Whether you decide to overhaul your entire academic operations ecosystem at once or take it one step at a time, the following practices can help you successfully evaluate and implement new approaches to academic operations functions. 

1. Map Processes & Assess Operational Needs

Clarity on the operational needs and processes of your function is fundamental to making improvements that are truly significant.  Working as a team, determine mapping parameters before making flowcharts to accurately represent each step of the process in proper sequence. 

Key areas to assess during process mapping: 

• Number and order of steps in the process 
• Individuals and teams involved at each step
• Owners and contributors at each step
• Cadence and timeline of the process 
• Technology and tools used in the process 
• Redundant work/processes 
• Undocumented processes and/or knowledge 

These visual tools can help you clarify how different functions overlap, identify issues such as redundancies, and see bottlenecks, including reliance on institutional memory or specific individuals. Take the opportunity to understand how different departments and individuals communicate with each other. Document the channels, methods, and cadences that these teams or departments use. Take similar care to assess your institution's operational needs.

2. Evaluate Your Data Infrastructure & Technology Needs 

To properly support the operational needs of an institution, the underlying IT infrastructure needs to be healthy and efficient. Before moving forward, get the thumbs up from your tech team that your IT has undergone and cleared a comprehensive assessment to address outdated systems, security vulnerabilities, and potential bottlenecks. 

Understand where your institution's operations can benefit from technology-facilitated automation and optimization and where your institution’s human resources can best be deployed on strategic, student-facing efforts rather than on manual data entry or repetitive tasks. Again, work with your technology team to understand what software solutions are already in place that are being used to execute or contribute to academic operations. This will help as you map all data sources associated with your academic operations and how they intersect.

3. Align With Student Needs & Institutional Priorities

Assess how you can meet student needs in the context of what is feasible within your institution. Input from all impacted groups needs to be carefully gathered, considered, evaluated and decided upon before proceeding with change management. Various student needs should be examined to avoid incomplete or biased information. 

For any solution to be sustainable, having an honest assessment of an institution's priorities is critical. There are many options to decide among when you’re looking to optimize your academic operations based on your audit, resources, and budget. Include a comprehensive evaluation based on the current situation, budget, growth predictions, state legislation, and stakeholder needs. 

4. Gather Feedback & Implement Change Management

Feedback from the different people who will be affected by changes will help determine how to best implement the changes for each department or team. Different methods will be better for some individuals and departments. Demonstrate how proposed upgrades will help each campus unit meet its mission and strategic goals to reduce resistance to the process and effort required by each team member to optimize the operations. 

Bring a project team together that is representative of each department or operational area to implement change management. Focus on training, facilitation, and process redesign, where relevant, while making sure to tailor all actions based on the specific unit and issue you are improving. 

5. Implement Modernized Processes 

Optimize existing processes or introduce new practices at your institution to benefit administrators and students. To enforce compliance and consistency throughout the organization, academic operation functions are often streamlined with pre-built rules based on industry best practices. For institution-specific policies, some universities achieve this goal by building custom rules with a flexible interface.

Once an integrated system is in place, administrators who previously found themselves left to figure out how to meet institutional goals on their own can now operate more confidently. Access to data gives them solid ground to build on, whether that be working toward an agreement involving various stakeholders or having evidence to back up an important decision. With an efficient and transparent academic operations ecosystem, academic leaders are able to more efficiently manage budgets, resources, and facilities while fostering a culture of student excellence. 

‍

About Coursedog

Coursedog is the Academic Operations Platform, unifying how higher ed manages scheduling, curriculum, catalogs, assessment, and more. Built on a layer of actionable analytics and seamless integrations with every major SIS, Coursedog is where academic operations drive student success.

Higher ed can now manage all aspects of academic operations in one platform, eliminating time-consuming and manual work. This single source of truth provides transparency, eliminates errors, and brings all of your data together in one place. 

The Coursedog platform bolsters student outcomes with streamlined and data-informed academic operations. Determine course demand with new analytics, map and assess learning outcomes, and build curriculum maps to support student outcomes. Ensure students can easily access curriculum information and policies with an accurate, searchable, and user friendly catalog. 

Coursedog is the trusted partner of more than 300 institutions, driving student and institutional success through intelligent, unified academic operations. 

Book a Demo

‍

‍