MOVING FROM SPREADSHEETS TO AN ONLINE ACADEMIC SCHEDULE BUILD PROCESS

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MOVING FROM SPREADSHEETS

TO AN ONLINE ACADEMIC

SCHEDULE BUILD PROCESS

Michael Lamb

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Collecting Course Changes

Many schools use a variety of methods for collecting course changes: • Paper spreadsheets • Electronic spreadsheets • Email • Phone calls • Word of mouth

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Collecting Course Changes

How do you track all of these changes?

• Collecting paper, having to store it, file it,

retrieve it

• Looking through multiple emails to find the

correct/most up to date information

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Collecting Course Changes

In addition, you also have to try to decode what

people mean, especially if you’re collecting paper

documents (or, even worse, what that note

you

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Collecting Course Changes

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Collecting Course Changes in EMS

You’ve made your point; how can EMS help?

Using EMS, you can utilize the Campus Planning

Interface to give your customers an easy to use web interface where they can look at their courses, make changes, and give you the opportunity to easily collect and read the changes they make. No more having to read chicken scratch, or figure out what exactly changed on the spreadsheet – you run a report in EMS and can quickly focus on just the changes.

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Collecting Course Changes in EMS

Wow, that sounds amazing! I can’t wait to start!

Great! A few things to keep in mind when you

start planning on using EMS to help you collect

course changes:

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Collecting Course Changes in EMS

Collecting course changes through EMS is intended to be done in waves/phases. What we mean by this is that

you’ll have a period of time where the schedule is open for changes. Once the deadline is reached, access to

make course changes is shut down, and you then input all the course changes that were collected during this period. If a user needs to make a changes while they’re locked

out, you’ll need to decide how to handle that.

Best practice: inform users they’ll need to hold onto changes until the next period of changes is open.

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Collecting Course Changes in EMS

Change is hard.

Having people use the CPI to collect course changes

will give you overall benefits, but be aware that

you’re likely going to face some resistance. Work

with your users to make sure they’re prepared and

practiced for using the tool. Also make sure

you’re

comfortable with the tools you’re having them use;

you want to be confident when you show users how

to use the new system.

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Collecting Course Changes in EMS

Keeping those things in mind, let’s begin. 1. Who are your users?

1. Are they department administrators, chairs, deans, or who? 2. What subjects will they be needing access to?

2. What’s the timeline for your term? How many rounds of changes will you be doing, and how long will it take you to enter that information into your SIS between rounds?

3. How will you train your users?

1. Make sure you leave enough time to train your users – you don’t want to be throwing them into the deep end with no time to practice and a deadline fast approaching

2. On the other hand, make sure you’re not doing your training five months before users will actually be using the system, as they’ll likely forget most of what you showed them

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Collecting Course Changes in EMS

What kind of information can I collect from my users?

Course Changes: you can choose to allow your users to edit: subject, course number, section number, title,

estimated enrollment, instructor, and credit hours.

Course Date (Meeting Pattern changes): you can choose to allow your users to edit: start/end dates, start/end

times, days of the week, course type.

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Collecting Course Changes in EMS

Alright, I’m letting my users submit course changes

online, but how do

I

get the data?

Once the deadline for changes is reached, you’ll

need to turn off access to the CPI for your users.

Then, you’ll need to run the

Course Changes

report.

This report will give you a listing of all the changes

that your users made through the CPI.

Use this report to enter the changes submitted to you

into your SIS.

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Collecting Course Changes in EMS

You are still the gatekeeper of data – if someone has entered something strange through the CPI, you do not have to put it into your SIS.

After you have finished inputting the changes, you’ll be ready to re-sync EMS with your updated SIS. Re-sync the term (only AFTER you are SURE you’ve entered all the course changes), and EMS will pull in the new data.

You may get a “Missed SIS Changes” report; if you do, SAVE A COPY. These are changes that EMS detected were made in EMS but not inputted into the SIS. Keep in mind that some of these “missed changes” may simply be differences in how the course was inputted into the CPI (“ENG 1XX”)

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