Dear colleagues,
The Office for Student Success (OSS) is pleased to bring to you this next edition of Beyond the Classroom, a resource to support our collective efforts to create a supportive and inclusive culture of success for our students. Resources are ever present but are of little use if we do not understand what undergraduate students experience and if we don’t know what they need from us. So new to this edition (and going forward) you will also hear from students – stories or feedback on what has been formative and impactful to them in their work with you. We hope you will find these inspiring.
With a focus on improving the student experience, we embarked on addressing the findings of the Baker Tilly academic scheduling audit with the Office of the Registrar (OTR), Office of the Provost, students and campus partners last fall. The audit revealed concerns such as inconsistent use of time-bands and resulting schedules that are not student-centered. It also revealed a need for better data to inform scheduling processes, and we heard that our registration processes were cumbersome and frustrating to students. OTR has been working diligently to identify and prioritize opportunities for improving scheduling and registration processes for students, faculty and staff and is convening an Academic Scheduling Committee that will include representation from school schedulers, faculty and deans. This committee will identify predictive data requirements, enhanced data tools and reports to improve our back-end scheduling processes, and determine strategies to improve communication between schools and OTR. We are also working with campus partners on the rollout of Banner 9 Self-Service (an upgrade to the current GWeb system) which will increase the ease and accessibility of registration for students.
