For the new applications delivered on the Ad Astra platform, we’ve adopted an improved, more agile product release strategy. This change allows us to quickly build innovative applications and features while maintaining the familiar elements and functionality you've come to love and expect. 

This development shift allows us to iterate faster than ever before, and we’re excited to share what we’re working on with you. You'll find the product journey divided into the following three sections:

While we’ll continue our regular release process for Astra Schedule and Platinum Analytics, this journey will be updated weekly (we’re not kidding, we’re working fast!) to keep you up to speed on all the progress taking place with our new applications. Check back often to see all the exciting developments, or better yet, follow this page to ensure you never miss a thing

 

Now Available

Section Details and Collaboration

We've enhanced our sections in Ad Astra to include the necessary fields you need to update your schedule. Also, we've brought collaboration to sections! You can use the comments feature inside a section to ensure everyone's in the loop when making critical section changes.

 

Modality for Monitor

By adding modality to Monitor, you'll easily be able to tell at what rate your various types of section offerings (on-ground, online, or hybrid) are filling. This insight will help you understand how your students' modality is impacting your campus regarding section distribution.

 

Enhanced Reporting

We're making the analysis data from Align and Monitor available for reporting in Ad Astra. With this data, we will be releasing an ever-growing list of reports starting with course offering and Pathway analysis reports.

 

New Ticket Submission in Ad Astra

The ticket submission experience is being updated in Ad Astra to create more consistency for our customers and support staff.

 

Modify Simulated Student Populations

Users can edit the simulated student population, which allows institutions to account for changes not represented in historical trends.

 

View Student Populations

This feature allows users to view students and their general data to ensure accuracy when running a Predict analysis. In addition to actual students, users can also see the total number of simulated students by type (new, transfer, returning, departing).

 

Pathway Health

Understand how Pathway design is striking an appropriate balance between course choice and sustainability. Pathway Health expands on Cohort Enrollment Health by looking at course sharing across Pathways and course choice within Pathways.

 

View and Manage Pathways

View and manage your Pathways in Ad Astra to help ensure you're paving the way for students to get the courses they need when they need them.

 

Enrollment Health by Campus

Support your institution’s completion promise with Cohort Enrollment Health, by measuring the fragmentation created in your pathways by your student's campus preferences.

 

Degree Velocity

Understand the impacts on student success before their graduation. See your different student groups' trajectories towards graduation in-order to spot opportunities for targeted interventions.

 

Course Change Tracking

As you make updates to your courses, we are logging those changes and making it easy for you to see when and why changes were made to meet the needs of your students.

 

Visualize the Risk of Student Time Conflicts

To help ensure you're meeting the needs of your students, we're highlighting courses that have a high risk of section time conflicts and providing visibility into alternate times.

 

Session Timeout for Astra Schedule

In Astra Schedule, there are times when the system times-out and allows users to continue working. Unfortunately, all the work performed after the time-out isn't preserved. With Session Timeout, you'll receive a warning that the system is nearing a time-out. To keep working, simply dismiss the alert. Otherwise, you'll be directed back to the login screen.

This feature was made available in the 8.9.2 release.

 

Course Group Analysis

We’ll improve our demand analysis by considering the choices students have historically made for course groups and applying that to our demand predictions for upcoming terms. By doing this, we'll paint a clear picture of which courses in the offered course group will have higher demand and require more capacity.

 

Measuring Student Demand for Course Based on Their Pathway

When measuring demand for a course, it’s critical to understand which students require the course for their pathway, and which students have satisfied that requirement already. We’re adding all of your students’ pathway progress to our demand analysis so you can ensure all students have access to the courses they need when they need them.

 

Simulating Transfer, Returning, and Departing Students

Just like what we're already doing for new students, we'll also simulate transfer, returning, and departing students, which will continue to improve our demand analysis and help you better prepare for your upcoming terms.

 

Automatic Student to Pathway Association

A core building block for our analysis requires us to properly analyze a student’s pathway progress. To ensure accurate results when analyzing course demand, we’re automatically assigning your students to their Pathway based on attributes you define so we know what classes they may need in upcoming terms.

 

Export

This feature will allow you to export Align, Predict, and Monitor course data to an external file for your own use.

 

Campus Groups

Campus Groups allows you to see campus-specific Align and Predict recommendations and Monitor registration information combined into groups that you define.

 

Measuring Demand Per Campus

As we're forecasting student demand, we'll also take campus preference into account. This will enhance our predictive analysis by properly dividing up the demand for specific courses based on the campus where they're taught.

 

Student Course Load Customization

We'll add more flexibility in determining your students' ideal load for demand projections. With this ability, you'll be able to tailor the results to match your specific student populations better.

 

Course Demand Visualizations

In Align, we're adding visualizations of your course data to paint a clearer picture for your end-users. These visualizations will show where they can make an impact and positively affect course availability for your students. You'll not only be able to see historical demand over recent terms but also projected demand for the term in focus.

We're also delivering visualizations that will display enrollment for each section of a course. These charts highlight which sections have low or high enrollment making it clear where you can adjust to better meet your students' needs.

 

Simulating New Students

To accurately forecast your incoming students, we are adding a simulation of new students to our demand analysis. These simulated students will be counted in our demand projections, and you’ll even be able to see the simulated students represented when browsing courses.

 

Data Recovery

Your piece of mind is our priority. That's why we're leveraging all appropriate measures in the AWS platform to allow for recovering data at any point in time.

 

Section Details

When planning changes to your course schedule, understanding the details about your sections is a critical part of that process. We’re in the process of adding section detail information to your courses within Monitor and Align. This will make it easier to understand the current state of your schedule and help you make small tweaks that make a big difference for your students.

Our goal is to share the following data points for each section:

• Start date
• End date
• Start time
• End time 
• Days met
• Part of term
• Room (bldg. + room #)
• Section code 
• Instructor
• Meeting type 
• Campus

 

Manage Users in Ad Astra

From Settings, you’ll have the ability to manage your users in Ad Astra. Going forward, you’ll be able to view all users in your system, see their email address, and what type of user they are. Also, with the proper user type, you’ll be able to invite new users, change their user type, and even delete users. This will help you easily manage your user base as needed.

 

Monitor Is Now Campus-Specific

In Monitor, you can now view a course’s details by campus, as well as design custom filters that allow you to build campus-specific course lists. This allows you to focus on enrollment for one or multiple campuses. Don’t worry - if you need to see enrollment progress for a course across all your campuses, you can do that too.

 

Exclude Sections From Analysis or Course Views by Meeting Type or Part of Term

When running an analysis to determine student demand for a course, it may be important to exclude certain sections to ensure the calculations are accurate as possible. You're now able to do that by Meeting Type or Part of Term. When sections are excluded from the analysis calculations, they're also excluded from the user interface. This will help reduce clutter and allow your users to focus on the sections that need their attention.