Course Availability and Planning in the New World

As one of the co-directors of the Student Administration part of the Mosaic project, I would like to respond to Paul Cervantes’ Op-Ed piece in the Daily Wildcat published on 4/23/2009, ‘The Problem with WebReg.’ Paul’s article makes a number of good points that I’d like to remark on. First, the problem of appropriately matching the supply of seats in courses to the demand for those seats is a hard one to solve. Airlines have thrown a lot of money at this problem, and they do it pretty well with seats on planes; but, as many of us have experienced at one time or other in our lives, sometimes they get it horribly wrong. One simple and unavoidable reason behind this is the long lead times required to support class scheduling and registration—did you know that preparing the class schedule for the fall semester (in August) begins around January/February? A lot might happen in those intervening months that can lead to big problems on the first day of classes. The lead times shorten for the spring term, but only slightly, so there isn’t much relief there either. Furthermore, scarce resources (budgets), inadequate controls (technology), and the ever-changing availability of instructors to teach and students to learn only increases the difficulty for all the parties concerned. PeopleSoft’s Campus Solutions, the product we are installing via the Mosaic project, will actually give colleges and departments a number of tools beyond aesthetics to manage the availability of courses and course seats; some of these tools are the very ones that Paul mentions in his article. By way of example, CS can be configured to enforce prerequisites; it has wait-listing capabilities; seats can be reserved in courses for students who meet various characteristics such as their career, academic program or classification level; it can cap units; it has a ‘ticketing system’ whereby a specific student can be given permission to enroll in a particular class. It’s important for us all to understand, however, that these tools will require some wisdom and experience to wield for the benefit of all. I don’t really want to be dramatic, but when a system enforces prerequisites, or reserve capacities, or enrollment permissions, it *enforces* them. This enforcement has the potential to be welcome relief for departments which need it, but a nightmare for everybody concerned if this strict enforcement leads to more frustration, manual exception processing, and severe restrictions on choices for students. As an institution we will have to take some time to tune this new functionality so that we don’t end up turning it off as soon as we enable it. On the planning side, CS also has tools to help students select the classes they want to take in current and future semesters based on their SAPR. This is just the kind of information that a college or department might make use of to anticipate future demand. Again, however, while the availability of course planning tools for students and a central place to store the results make important contributions towards anticipating future demand more exactly, it’s not a slam dunk by any sense. Intentions of future behavior diverge from actual behavior for all kinds of reasons: existing students leave and new students arrive; students’ interests change; faculty take sabbaticals; department and student cash flows change; etc. Nevertheless, thanks to our new software, we will very soon have the potential to bring to bear on this problem some of the creative ideas Paul has shared. Over the course of the next several months, the project teams will be working to understand how best to ‘roll out’ these new tools (along with the rest of the suite’s functionality) in ways that provide rather than constrain services, and that maximize the acceptance of our new capabilities while minimizing our regrets about how we choose to use them. I’m confident, however, that with a little patience and goodwill, we will have a future that will let us do more towards managing classes more effectively than we can at the present.