Community college students often struggle to complete their programs and to complete them on time. One underappreciated reason for this is limited course availability: Colleges do not offer the courses students need in the terms and at times that work for them. Instead, many colleges rely on asynchronous courses to provide flexibility and create term-by-term schedules that can be unpredictable and unresponsive to the needs of students, who may also be balancing work and family responsibilities.
But practitioners lack the necessary evidence to implement new scheduling strategies. This project seeks to fill this gap by exploring the implications of current scheduling practices for students’ completion of programs of study. What trade-offs do students make when selecting courses each semester, and how do their preferences for course features (timing, modality, location) vary depending on their responsibilities outside of college, such as work, commuting, and caregiving?
Working with faculty, staff, and students across three community colleges, researchers will identify common scheduling challenges, student preferences around course timing and modalities, and strategies for institutional improvement. Detailed case studies—using a student survey that includes short ‘what-if’ scenarios, along with interviews and administrative data analyses—will provide essential details and recommendations about ways institutions can respond to student and faculty preferences, address course availability challenges and institutional constraints, and develop course schedules that allow more students to take the courses they need when they need them—and in their preferred modalities. Findings from the study will be compiled into a course scheduling playbook that community colleges can reference to develop more student-responsive scheduling practices. Rachel Baker of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education will be co-PI on the project.
Funding for this project is provided by Ascendium Education Group.