Arkansas State University will be moving toward centralized scheduling beginning in spring 2024.

Centralized scheduling will encourage colleges to schedule classes more holistically and spread out which classes are scheduled and when. 

“We are trying to make adjustments so that 80% of our classes are offered from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. every day of the week. It’s a guiding principle that we are working toward, ” said Brad Rawlins, Ph.D., interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Communication. 

William McLean, Ph.D, associate vice chancellor for faculty relations, said currently, classes are heavily scheduled on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

“If you were to look at this how an Outlook calendar looks, it’s very dark from Tuesday, Thursday at nine to 11 o’clock. Everything else is very, very, very lightly shaded,” McLean said. “What was happening was students were getting hurt by this process. It was like they were trying to get their gen ed classes in and also trying to get their major classes in, but we don’t have enough dispersion across the schedule to make that happen.”

Implementing this schedule will involve the deans of A-State’s various colleges working with department chairs to ensure classes are evenly distributed. The changes must also be approved by the Faculty Senate and Shared Governance committees.

Changes to centralized scheduling will be seen as early as next semester, although the plan will be more firmly in place by next fall. McLean said the process will be ongoing. 

“It is going to be a little time to get through the process,” said Scott Gordon, Ph.D., dean of the College of Nursing and Health Professions. “Getting it in place by next fall needs having it ready by mid spring semester, which is when we develop the schedule for next fall.”

Centralized scheduling will look different for each college.

“What we’ve traditionally done is, if it was a freshman or sophomore class, it would be Monday, Wednesday, Friday, eight o’clock, nine o’clock, 10 o’clock or 11 o’clock. So if you have those 50 minute blocks as freshmen or sophomores, because our students were more likely to be taking something in English or history or some of the gen ed classes at the same time,” said Jim Washam, Ph.D, dean of the Neil Griffin College of Business. 

Washam said the college will likely make Monday/Wednesday/Friday classes in the mornings and have Monday/Wednesday classes in the afternoon. 

“I have three departments in my college and so if we usually try to coordinate the classes anyway,” said Jennifer Bouldin, Ph.D, dean of the College of Science and Mathematics. “So with centralized scheduling, it puts everything all the time saying that time slots. It enables the students to better work their schedules and hopefully is helpful to the student as far as being able to get the classes that they need and thus they can work quicker toward graduation.”

Gordon said some colleges will have to have exceptions to the new setup.

“We have a lot of clinical courses and laboratory courses that run over multiple course times as well as sometimes all day long,” Gordon said. “This new grid policy will have exceptions made for certain programs that are just inherent to the program.”

In addition, courses with low enrollment may be combined or only offered during certain semesters. McLean said graduation requirements will not be eliminated. 

“It’s more of a course by course basis,” Washam said. “It becomes a decision of ‘Do you have to run the class with low enrollment, is it an elective and they can take something else, is it a major course, do we have something else that’s close that we could substitute for it?’ Part of that comes down to if we cancel that low enrollment class, how does it affect the student? And so our goal is to find a solution that (has) the lowest impact possible.”

Nikesha Nesbitt, Ph.D, dean of University College, said combating low enrollment may be a matter of combining courses. 

“You may have low enrollment spread across courses that’s on a Tuesday/Thursday, Monday/Wednesday and it could be that you just need to combine those sections into one course. So it may not necessarily be an area of deleting or getting rid of a course.”

Categories: News