Enrollment Management Recommendations and Ideas

 

A short course on building class schedules:

While building a department schedule, several factors should be taken into account.  These factors include:

1.      Any data available that may assist in determining the demand for specific courses.  You must consider not only which courses are in the greatest demand by students but also which days of the week and at what time the class is needed by the majority of students.  (Program Review data is most helpful.)

2.      The schedule rollover from the previous year will be provided for use in this process.  In a perfect situation, all of the information on course demand would have already figured into the process the previous year and you could simply ‘rollover’ the schedule from the previous year and repeat the same schedule of classes.  However, in reality, most rollovers include classes that have been scheduled to meet the needs of the faculty involved or, more often than not, reflect a schedule that was created around the availability of classrooms at the time of scheduling.  For these reasons, many courses on a rollover may not have been offered at the optimum time or day and may have suffered from low enrollment or possibly even cancelled due to lack of enrollment.  In addition, enrollment trends are dynamic.  There may be changes in student demand for a particular course that did not exist the previous year.

The rollover should be used as a starting point for creating the new schedule.  If aspects of the previous schedule are adequately meeting the student demands for a course, then those courses can simply be ‘rolled over’ without a change.  The more difficult task is trying to change the day and time of those courses that were not offered at an optimum time to meet student needs.  In these cases, you must check with your IDS or Secretary to the Dean of Instruction to find the availability of classrooms so that you might find a more appropriate time to offer the course.  Finding an available classroom at the time of need will be much harder than it sounds!!!! (Negotiations with other department chairs may be necessary---chocolate, lattes, etc. always a plus—just kidding.)

3.    Courses from other disciplines or departments that may need to be taken in conjunction with, or prior to, courses in your department or discipline must also be considered.

For example, if most students need to take chemistry and microbiology in the same semester the two courses must be scheduled in a manner that makes this task possible for the students.  Such courses cannot be scheduled at the same time.

Likewise, if one course is a prerequisite to another, the prerequisite course should always be offered prior to the semester of the course that requires the prerequisite.

4.   The availability of both full-time and adjunct faculty must also be taken into account when building a semester schedule.  You will be given responses from your department faculty regarding the days and times they prefer to teach.  You will also need to know whether full-time faculty prefer to have and overload, and if so, how much.

Start by scheduling your full-time faculty first.  Not everyone will get the exact schedule they prefer.  Most faculty prefer not to have huge time gaps between classes (such as an early morning class followed by a late afternoon class).  However, a time gap of sixty to ninety minutes actually allows an opportunity for faculty to schedule office hours and be available to students before and after class.

According to the union contract, a full load for full-time faculty is a teaching assignment of 1.9333 to 2.0666 FTE per year.  An instructor can choose to work more than this.  Anything over this amount is assigned as an overload. 

The maximum load allowed for any full-time faculty member is 1.6 FTE per semester.

All overloads are supposed to be classes that are scheduled at 2:00 p.m. or later.  Although this is sometimes difficult to arrange, an overload course that is before 2:00 p.m. may not be approved.

Maximum assignment for adjunct faculty is .6 FTE per semester or intersession.  It is always wise to leave some adjunct faculty without a maximum load so that they may be available for substitute teaching.  An adjunct with a .6 load may not be used for substitution.  Be sure to check that the adjunct is not already assigned courses at one of the other two campuses.  Loads at Norco, Moreno Valley and Riverside are all counted as part of their .6 assignment.

An optimum department schedule would have 75% of all courses being taught by full-time faculty and only 25% by adjunct faculty.  Although this is a desired arrangement, in most cases it is impossible to create due to lack of full-time faculty.  If a particular area in the department exists in which 50% or more of the courses are consistently taught by adjunct faculty, this data should be used to justify the need for new full-time faculty.  The goal is to maintain a 75/25 ratio of full-time to adjunct faculty each semester.

5.          Classroom Utilization is used by the State to determine the need for funding of new growth.  This means we must try to have all classrooms utilized to their capacity every day of the week.  Creativity with scheduling can help with utilization of classrooms during lag times (such as late afternoons during the week, Fridays and Saturdays).  Such scheduling is encouraged if it does not affect the course enrollment negatively.

Creating teaching assignments for faculty:

1.      The IDS for your department will distribute and collect forms from the faculty (both full-time and adjunct) in the department asking for their teaching preference and availability in the upcoming semester or intersession.  You should receive the completed forms with the rollover from the previous year’s schedule.  These forms will be helpful in determining what each faculty member prefers for their schedule.  Unfortunately, not all faculty members will return the form.  This makes scheduling more difficult.

2.      You must complete a Tentative Teaching Assignment form for all faculty.  The IDS will give you the deadline for submitting these forms each session. 

The forms are completed as follows:

Thank you to Rebecca Loomis for her work in the drafting of this page.