Melinda Roy

Course compaction can either improve or impair student learning and progression to graduation, and understanding compaction is a key tool for strategic enrollment management. Check out our first two posts in this series all about course compaction:

  1. What Impact Does Course Compaction Have on Student Success?

  2. 4 Ways Course Compaction Benefits Instructors

Course compaction can improve student program progression rates by streamlining course offerings, but as with any enrollment management initiative, there must be metrics developed to evaluate its effectiveness. Student experiences with registration, in courses, and completing their program must be reviewed from a course compaction lens to ensure the curriculum and offering schedule are effectively supporting student success and the Strategic and Academic Plans.

Course indicators of compaction inhibiting student progress:

  1. High course turnaway rates are a tricky to measure, though some indication of this may be available by talking with Academic Advisors, reviewing student feedback surveys, or by analyzing the error messages created by the enrollment engine in your student information system. Courses with high enrollment rates during priority registration, and with waitlists reaching capacity during or shortly after priority registration ends, may be those with high turn-away rates. Cases where this may not apply are cohort programs with pre-determined block registration and little flexibility in program paths.
  2. All (or nearly all) sections are filled before the start date of class, and earlier than average when compared with other high-demand courses.
  3. All sections have waitlists regardless of weekday or time slot.
  4. Few course section offerings in the term or annual schedule (due to limited instructor availability or appropriate spaces, rather than scheduling decisions).

Registration behaviour indicators of compaction inhibiting student progress:

  1. Multiple individual students are on waitlists for multiple (or all) sections of a course.
  2. The same students appear on waitlists for the same course across multiple semesters.
  3. Students in a program with cross-referenced or shared courses often take courses out-of-sequence and/or take extra elective courses in unexpected semesters (such as a 200-level course elective in their 4th year).
  4. Year-over-year trends in shared courses may indicate that students are registering in them at increasingly later in their program. Long length of delays in waitlisted students successfully registering in a course across years.
  5. Year-over-year trends in a course show consistent and increasing registration exceptions are granted by instructors to admit students above established class sizes, and still consistently have waitlists.

While none of these indicators on their own, or in a single semester or year, can accurately identify a problem with course compaction, curriculum, scheduling, or space, more than 3 is worth further investigation through a compaction lens. In our next post we will discuss indicators of healthy compaction.

The thresholds for setting benchmarks for any of these metrics must be determined by the institution and consider not only student registration ease but also student academic preparedness for a course. In the last post in this series we will discuss the steps to building a compound metric to understand compaction.

Are you ready to make adjustments to your course offerings but unsure what changes will mean for the future of institution enrollments? Plaid Forecast is collaborative and easy to use tool which allows you to create fast and accurate projections for both program and course enrollment levels. Book a demo today!

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