As a Senior Strategic Consultant at Ad Astra, I work with institutions who are trying to overcome the daunting challenge of offering enough of the courses students need, when they need them. 

Building a schedule to meet these needs is complicated. When it comes to making effective course changes to the upcoming term, scheduling teams are often faced with the same overwhelming feeling of, “How will I ever distribute all of this information, track the decisions that the academic units are making, and complete those changes in our scheduling system?”  

For years, institutions have passed around Excel spreadsheets accompanied by lengthy email chains. To say this method is painful is an understatement. Recognizing this struggle, Ad Astra set out to design Align, a succinct workflow application that provides a concise system of record to track changes made to the course schedule throughout the academic scheduling process. 

The introduction of workflow into the Align application allows for institutions to evaluate, review, approve, and schedule those changes in the system. By alerting team members and users throughout this process, comments are captured and can be reviewed throughout the entire planning and registration cycle, allowing users to communicate effectively and efficiently. 

As resources continue to be more and more constrained, we are working to give users time back in their day by minimizing back-and-forth emails and simplifying scheduling with the ultimate goal of improving student access. Isn’t that the real goal of all of this?