For college students, course registration is a high stakes activity and can mean the difference between staying on time to degree completion or falling off track because required courses in their degree pathway sequence are full or canceled at the last minute. For faculty and administrators, course registration time means ensuring student success while managing fiscal and human resources. Course enrollment patterns can change from semester to semester or the last like term for a number of reasons, making it essential to monitor course registration comprehensively.   

As a former Associate Provost, I know that it can be difficult to monitor course enrollment in a meaningful way on a regular and consistent basis during peak registration times. Often, faculty and administrators need to pull course enrollment reports manually and/or use several different sources to make meaning of the resulting data. This task can be daunting with often competing priorities during peak registration time.   

Having previewed the course registration monitoring tool from Ad Astra, aptly named Monitor, I am thrilled to share my excitement with you about this new tool. Monitor will allow institutions to view point-in-time course registration metrics. This allows stakeholders to make informed decisions using one tool, eliminating the need to cobble together manual reports from several different sources. Course registration thresholds are tracked to help institutions focus on courses that might need immediate attention if they are trending toward being over-enrolled or under-enrolled. Data is presented with clear visuals that allow users to drill down to view additional information at the course and section level.  

I am sorry that I was not able to implement this tool at my previous institution before coming to Ad Astra. For those of us who had day-to-day responsibility for monitoring course registration and course enrollment, it would have made the task much less of a manual process and would have helped us feel confident that decisions to add or cancel sections were well informed.