How To Use Align

Course List

The course list becomes a convenient worksheet for those involved in the schedule review, approval, and update process. When section offering changes are entered into the SIS and re-imported, the Planned sections and status are reset. While we do not write back sections to the SIS, the course list can be seen as your planning center for the upcoming term.

• The Not Offered toggle will update the course list to include courses not offered in the current term but have registered demand via the Predict analysis for Predict clients only.
• The export button () will send your Align content into an Excel spreadsheet with additional information.
• The Add New Course button () will allow Admin users to create a new course and section for a current or future analysis term. This is only available for clients with section editing enabled. 
  • Expired or Excluded courses will not appear as options when creating a new course.
• The information icon () will display the last run date and time for Predict clients only.

When reviewing courses in your analysis term, each course includes:

• Candidate Type and the Candidate Detail: an explanation for the recommendation 

• Offered: sections and seats currently offered in the analyzed term.

• Needed: the total number of recommended sections and seats based upon the data analyzed.

• Planned: total number of sections and seats that will be offered after the scheduling changes are confirmed. This value starts out equal to Offered and can be toggled up or down to model the addition or reduction of sections.

• Status: the status of a course that can be changed relative to your schedule change process.

Your institution's admin can create Campus Groups to see course offering recommendations and registration tracking data in Align and Monitor for a logical group of campuses in addition to individual campuses.

Select a course to see the course visuals, sections associated with the course, and section meeting details. Learn about the course, section, and meeting details.

Filter Options

You can click "More" in the filter menu for additional drop-down filters you can add to help you narrow your results. The list of additional filters is dependent on the kind of data you are viewing (e.g., Align vs. Monitor vs. Enrollment, etc.). Once you have added a filter, click on "More" again to remove it. 

You can also use advanced filtering that allows you to build structured queries using a query-like language. Learn more about field definitions and sharing your filters.

Course Recommendations

To better understand the reason behind the Candidate Type assignments, users can hover over the Candidate Type icon to see both the Candidate Type and the Candidate Detail for a given course.

Candidate Types

• Addition Candidates (indicated by an up arrow): sections that could potentially be added to the schedule to meet student needs. Situations where the demand indicates that you could fill at least another half section based on average section size.

• Reduction Candidates (indicated by a down arrow): sections that could potentially be removed from the schedule without negatively impacting student need.

• No Action Candidates (indicated by a checkmark): sections that are being offered appropriately. No action is needed for these sections.

Candidate Details

Candidate Details for Addition Candidates

• Standard Addition: analysis determines the needed number of sections is greater than the number offered for the analysis term

• Potential Addition: analysis determines the needed number of sections is equal to the number offered for the analysis term, but additional values, like Enrollment Ratios and section count from baseline and like terms, show evidence that additional sections may be needed

• Not Offered: analysis determines the needed number of sections is greater than the number of offered for the analysis term and that this course is not currently being offered for the analysis term.

Candidate Details for Reduction Candidates

• Standard Reduction: analysis determines that the needed number of sections is less than the number offered for the analysis term and the Enrollment Ratio for the baseline term is less than 95% or the course was not offered in the baseline term

• Low Demand: demand is minimal for the analysis term and the historical Enrollment Ratio is less than 50%

Candidate Details for No Action Candidate

• Standard No Action: analysis determines the needed number of sections is equal to the number offered for the analysis term but does not meet the addition criteria

• New Course:  a course is less than 365 days old within 10 days of the analysis term start date, and there are no historical equivalents

• Never Been Taught on this Campus: a course or its equivalents have never been offered on that specific campus before

• Overloaded No Action: offered sections exceed needed sections determined by analysis, but baseline term Enrollment Ratio is greater than or equal to 95%

• Not Offered: analysis determines the needed number of sections is equal to the number offered for the analysis term but does not meet the addition criteria and that this course is not currently being offered for the analysis term. 

Top Candidates

Top Candidates are flagged and sorted to the top of the list by default but can be sorted by different categories. Top Candidates are those recommendations, based on meeting certain data criteria, in which the system has the most confidence and that potentially have the highest impact. Top Candidates are currently based on only historical trend analysis.

Addition Top Candidate Criteria

• Historical enrollment ratio is greater than or equal to 95%,

• OR the highest enrollment of all the like terms is greater than the Seats Offered in the analysis term by more than 70% of the average analysis term section size for the course

Reduction Top Candidate Criteria

• Historical Enrollment Ratio < 70%

• AND seats offered in analysis term > Baseline Demand by at least the Average Section Size 

Course Status

Change a course status to Reviewed, Approved, Scheduled, or Blocked to track progress to indicate where the course is in the change lifecycle.

When changing the status of a course, a change message is generated and you are prompted to optionally select one or more other users to notify and to enter a message. Once the status change is confirmed, the messages are saved as comments in the course details. 

The status is automatically set to "Re-Evaluate" when a change in the Student Information System prompts updated recommendations on a course whose status was previously edited. The Re-Evaluate status may not be manually selected but typically occurs when a course status is edited while the term is in a roll-forward state. If recommendations change when the real term is restored, the Re-Evaluate status will appear as an alert.

Select a course to see the course visuals, sections associated with the course, and section meeting details. Learn about the course, section, and meeting details.

Export

The Align course list page can be exported to a .csv file so you can share or manipulate the data for your own needs. Look for the export icon near the top of the page.  Just click this icon, confirm you want to download the file and a .csv file will be saved to your computer's default downloads location. Find definitions for the exported columns here.

The Align course list export includes course identifying information:

• Sections and seats recommended by both historical analysis and Predict.

• Blended recommendation based upon your settings.

• Current and planned sections/seats.

• The campus group if applicable.

• Current review status of that course recommendation.

You can also check out the Align training session and the Align with Predict session!