NVC Leadership Message
Dr. Daniel Powell, Vice President for Academic Success
As we refine our approach to be student-ready, there has been considerable attention toward improvements in our scheduling practices. We are launching a year-long registration that will be available to students in the spring semester, allowing them to plan their entire 2023-2024 academic year with courses. Everyone across the college has stepped up to help with this heavy lift that has challenged us to rethink how we do things.
The leadership teams have also been engaged in Ad Astra software that allows us to mine and benchmark data to understand enrollment trends and registration patterns to help make improvements.
The most meaningful work, however, is that NVC has engaged faculty and staff across the college to create five guiding principles that lay the groundwork for continuous improvements. The guiding principles of strategic schedule building are highlighted below:
Evidence-Based Schedule: NVC will be equitable and inclusive of all students, faculty, and staff and will address racial and social justice issues. NVC will ensure a collaborative process for an accessible student-centered schedule using data to benchmark progress, such as course cancelation rates, section fill rates, and section enrollment ratios.
Student-Centered Practices: NVC will create complementary course section offerings that reflect student progression through their chosen path with accessible courses regarding times of day, modality, and parts of term. NVC will reflect upon and eliminate non-student-centered practices. As a Hispanic Serving Institution and an institution committed to anti-racism, we will recognize, resist, and transform any exclusionary practices that impact marginalized students.
Include Student Voice: Using trend data, lived human experience, and predictive analytics, combined with information from surveys and focus groups, we will build an equitable and inclusive schedule.
Reflective and Responsive: NVC will do the following: Design a thoughtful and responsive system that includes post hoc analysis that leads to continuous improvement; document the schedule management process that guides the decision-making during the registration period; ensure consistent and collaborative timelines in the schedule build process that include shared metrics for continuous improvement; ensure appropriate resources, such as faculty workload, space and average class size; and allow for flexibility to respond to enrollment trends leading into the start of the term.
Communication and Collaboration: NVC will ensure communication and collaboration across all stakeholders (the entire college, including departments, programs, and disciplines) and build the schedule with a management plan to respond to student enrollment needs.
