Happy new year and welcome to spring semester at Vol State! Classes start Jan. 17, so you still have time to add something if you’re looking to fulfill a New Year’s resolution related to self-improvement.
My personal recommendation would be a Spanish class because once you know some Spanish, you will need to travel to a Spanish-speaking country to try it out, and that’s the kind of self-enabling I really endorse. Also, our Spanish faculty are just great and you’ll have a wonderful time in class.
In the spirit of learning new things, I’d like to share a little bit of inside-baseball information about how we build the schedule of classes each semester. This has been a week of schedule tweaks and adjustments, and I think understanding this process can be helpful for anyone thinking about going to college or who knows someone going to college.
Making a schedule is a combination of art and science, which is a fancy way of saying it’s something of a guessing game. The main question is “what do new and continuing students need to make the schedule they need this semester?” That means 1) what classes/subjects, 2) how many sections, 3) in what modality, that is online, face-to-face, or hybrid, and 4) at what times.
To answer those questions, we’re looking at historical enrollment trends—how many students from fall usually come back in the spring? How many new students are likely to come in? How many transfer students? Especially since returning from the all-online semesters of the pandemic, these answers have been very difficult to predict.
So maybe you can imagine creating a schedule for one department, say Spanish: a few on-ground sections of Spanish I in the fall and Spanish II in the spring, a few online asynchronous (do the work on your own time, without a scheduled class meeting) sections, and one or two sophomore-level classes. Easy.
The trick is when we have to figure out beast-size schedule like that of our biggest department on campus, English, which offers more than 450 sections a year. Getting the right ratio of modalities and the correct spread across the timeslots is like the worst Sudoku puzzle ever invented, and my English department chair is an actual saint for the amount of work she does to get it right (not to mention my division administrative associate, who is a scheduling genius).
Even trickier is making sure that classes with only one section don’t conflict with other critical classes in other department so that students can’t make a schedule. For example, if Art’s Graphic Design and Entertainment Media Production’s Intro to Entertainment Business II are scheduled at the same time, none of our Multimedia and Web Design students will be able to make adequate progress in their programs.
Then we watch the classes fill—or not—as the students register. And then, last week and this week, we make some hard decisions. If a class only has a few students, we have to cancel it and find alternative classes for students. That can be extremely challenging, because most of our students are also working, and have set their work schedules based on what they expect their class schedule to be. Not to mention child care, family responsibilities, church and volunteer efforts, and all the many other things that make up our students’ lives.
All of which to say, we try very hard to get the schedule right months before students ever start enrolling in classes, and we’re working hard to get better each semester. However, it helps when students are checking their email and keeping an eye on their class schedules in the weeks before the semester starts—if you know one or are one, please keep an eye out and reach out to an advisor if there’s a schedule change.
We look forward to seeing you on campus this semester!
Erin I. Mann, Ph.D. is the Dean for Division of Humanities at Vol State.
