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Which Courses To Offer? (Using Data from Degree Audits)

Joel Wingo

July 22, 2015 21:08

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When thinking of which courses to schedule for an upcoming term, we administrators need to know which courses most students have taken and which ones they need.

It would be wonderful if Populi could generate a report, based on degree audits, showing how many active students have taken each of the required courses within each course group.

If we could see that, let's say 75 active studies have completed Greek I but only 25 have taken Hebrew I, then we would have some objective data to use as a basis for offering Hebrew I instead of Greek I.

This is especially useful for scheduling courses for part-time adult learners and distance learners who are not able to complete courses according to a suggested sequence.

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36 comments

• 1
  
  Mark Li November 20, 2015 19:10

  We would love to see a report for this as well.

• 2
  
  Ria Botzler, CVPM August 10, 2017 19:15

  Yes, PLEASE!

• 7
  
  Douglas Lewis August 10, 2017 21:35

  This would be a very useful report if it could also produce a list of the students who need the course but haven't taken it.  We have a large span of programs with overlapping requirements, and trying to predict the number of people likely to enroll in course X is impossible.  But it's a reasonable question and very important for our senior administration.

• 1
  
  John Hilger October 16, 2018 16:45

  Yes please, this feature would be very helpful for all. 

• 5
  
  Kimberly Hargrave December 14, 2018 23:06

  This feature would be very helpful. It would allow administrators to make better, more informed decisions, and would help students matriculate seamlessly.

• 1
  
  Benji Swafford June 14, 2019 17:21

  This feature would benefit Highlands College as well!

• 1
  
  Nader Abdallah June 14, 2019 18:13

  This feature would be useful

• 1
  
  Tracy Martin September 24, 2019 16:11

  ACU could use this as well. Additionaly, we would like a report of how many student still have a specified course unfilled on their degree planner.

   

• 2
  
  Chad Egresi March 03, 2020 16:55

  Yes, I agree with everyone. This functionality would be required for any real scheduling component of the system. That said, as a full service higher education LMS, I'm surprised that this request has more than 20! votes and it hasn't been acted upon since it began in 2015. 

• 1
  
  Adam Sentz March 03, 2020 18:15

  Chad Egresi - It may not sound like it, but reverse degree audits are a tremendously difficult thing to implement which is why, to the best of my knowledge, no SIS or LMS offers this functionality. It's basically the holy grail of student information systems. It's a problem we'd love to solve.

• 2
  
  Chad Egresi March 03, 2020 18:32

  Thanks for the information, Adam. 

• 1
  
  Joel Wingo March 03, 2020 18:56

  We have been able to use the Data Slicer to help with this issue. We run a report one class at a time to see how many Active students have completed various courses.

• 2
  
  Jessica Bowman March 03, 2021 19:41

  This is one of the most frustrating and time consuming issues that I have as an advisor. 

• 3
  
  Ron DeBerry March 19, 2021 18:16

  I agree with everyone about the usefulness of this report.  AND also need as Douglas Lewis pointed out, a report that identifies what courses are still needed and who needs them from the degree audits.  When planning courses to offer this report would be invaluable.

• 1
  
  Dawn Martin April 08, 2021 15:05

  Yes, I agree with all the comments! This type of reporting would streamline administrative and advisor tasks regarding student degree and course offering planning tremendously. Go for it Populi IT team!

• 1
  
  Vadim Chepurny May 18, 2021 21:30

  Adding a simple "Percent of Degree Completed" filter to the Data Slicer would be very helpful. For starters, the filter could simply compare the number of credits taken to how many are required. 

• 2
  
  Nikita Abraham July 19, 2021 21:09

  Yes, I agree with the other comments as well, this feature will help us track the courses that were offered and still required to be taken by students especially for scheduling classes. 

• 1
  
  Rhonda Haynes December 09, 2021 20:46

  I agree that this wold be a game changer.  Are there any developments?  Looks like the request was originally made in 2015.  Please advise.

• 1
  
  Chad Egresi December 09, 2021 21:08

  Hi, Rhonda - Thanks for chiming in about this. It would be a game-changer for sure!

  Due in large part to Populi's note that this is the "holy grail" of an LMS and my assumption back in early 2020 that this would likely not be completed anytime soon, we engaged a developer to custom-build a program that extracts degree audit details from Populi. The process to create the program has been extremely time-consuming and ultra-challenging, so there is validity to the fact that this is a very difficult endeavor. That said, it is very possible, especially if you're dealing with fewer variables. In addition to the extraction of that data from Populi through the custom program and API, we utilize a free program called "Unitime" - which then takes all the factors into account, such as faculty availability, the language of instruction, course overlaps (that would conflict with the students trying to register), modality of instruction, campus location (we have 3 at the moment) and about half a dozen more - crunches the data and "solves the problem" by providing an optimized course offering (schedule). Our program converts the recommended course data from a .csv file and puts it into a format that we can use and share with our students.  We spent about 15K on the original build and have spent an additional 5K over the course of the last year, updating and upgrading it. And lastly, now we don't have to keep a spreadsheet of 400+ students updated with every course they take, each term, to determine what courses should be offered next term (or run a ridiculous number of nuanced reports to piece it together).

  If you have any other questions, please let me know. 

  Good luck!

  Chad

• 3
  
  Adam Sentz December 09, 2021 21:51

  Rhonda Haynes - A pretty significant amount of thought, discussion and what you might call design work has gone into this problem. Up to the point of speccing out functionality and how it would fit in to Populi. Even with the minimum functionality to make it useful it's still a pretty big project so finding time in a coder's schedule to accommodate it is pretty challenging. That said, as we chip away at other high-value projects we get closer and closer to being able to work on a solution here.

• 1
  
  Jeffrey Sherrod April 01, 2022 14:24

  This would be really helpful for us as well. We came from another SIS called Oasis that isn't as full featured as Populi but had this functionality, so I didn't realize it was the holy grail of SIS. 

  Edited by Jeffrey Sherrod April 01, 2022 14:25
• 0
  
  Adam Sentz April 01, 2022 18:11

  Jeffrey Sherrod - I'm not sure we're thinking of the same functionality. Perhaps you could share more about their implementation?

• 0
  
  AJ Zimmermann May 07, 2022 04:08

  Yes Please! This would be fantastic! 

• 2
  
  Jeffrey Sherrod June 16, 2022 15:33

  Adam Sentz It wasn't as full featured as the program Chad detailed above. It simply ran a report of all the courses in the catalog with the names of students who had that class in their program but hadn't received credit for it. From there we would still have to work with the data to filter where students were in the program to determine if they were ready to take the class, met prereqs, etc., but it was a really helpful first step. 

• 0
  
  Adam Sentz June 21, 2022 21:14

  Jeffrey Sherrod - That's what I figured. That's much simpler than what we're thinking (which would include the things you had to do manually in addition). Want to open a new request for just that report? 

• 0
  
  Candice Freedman October 19, 2022 21:13

  This would be such a helpful feature to have when it comes time (now) to planning which classes to offer + how many students should be in each of them. It seems that at each mid-term I'm trying to find this information in the least amount of steps! We are still relatively small - 57 students but when we hit 100 - things are going to get a little more complicated. 

• 0
  
  Anna Morgan January 13, 2023 15:17

  Please do bring this report!

• 0
  
  Hilary Tarazi March 01, 2023 21:33

  Absolutely we need this.  I see it has been requested since 2015, so maybe this is the magic year?

• 1
  
  Alden Reynoso March 30, 2023 21:19

  Alden ReynosoToday at 14:05

  I was just coming on to see if there is a solution for this in the knowledge base.  I have found a way in Data Slicer to *almost* get what I need.  At least, it brings the number of students I need to look at individually down from 77 to 17....  Still painful, but not as.  The issue I have is that while Data Slicer will give me a list of students who have not yet "passed" the class, that list also includes students who may have had the class waived, transferred credits in, etc.  I still end up having to look at each degree audit for each student individually.  I think I am looking for the same thing as everyone else: I need the ability to run a report that tells me for students with an anticipated graduation date between X and X, and seeking degree X, how many still do not have (X course) requirement(s) satisfied?  Not just "passed." ("Satisfied" may come from having passed it, having it waived, or having units for it transferred in.)   I would happily take one that gave me the same info but for "has satisfied" and just subtract that out from the total number of enrollments in my program.

• 1
  
  Joshua Fischer April 05, 2023 17:10

  Agree completely!