When building your schedule and deciding when to offer sections, it’s possible that you may be offering the right number of seats of a course, but that section times are causing time conflicts for your students and impacting their ability to get the courses they need. Ad Astra’s Predict product can help minimize the risk that students will encounter conflicts they can’t resolve when registering for courses.
Be sure to view the training video at the bottom of this article.
Time Change Candidates
When using Predict, the Align course list will highlight courses that meet a certain threshold of conflict risk as Time Change Candidates to alert you that there may be changes needed. Time Change Candidates are courses that are not already an addition or reduction candidate and are limited to those courses that, when considering only students for whom the course is a requirement, create a high likelihood of conflict with their other required courses. If, on average, the students that need one of these course's sections are 50% likely or more to have a conflict at that time, then the course is flagged as a Time Change Candidate.
Conflict Risk Heatmap
To investigate potential time conflicts, a heatmap of student conflict risk is provided on each course (regardless of whether or not it is a Time Change Candidate) so that you can visualize likely student conflicts by time of day and day of week so that while making schedule changes you can identify and avoid as many potential conflicts as possible.
The Conflict Risk heatmap highlights the sections most likely to conflict with other needed courses for the projected population of students coming from Predict, based upon the choice of times available to them. The conflict risk “heat” increases as more students have a higher likelihood of conflict based upon the number of options they have available. Two factors of increased conflict are courses required in a pathway and a single course offering.
Filter by Pathway
While investigating possible time conflicts, you may want to filter down to one or more specific Pathways to understand the impact of the possible conflict for a certain subset of the student population. Setting a Pathway filter will update the possible conflicts feeding the heatmap to just those courses needed by students associated with the selected Pathways.
View Requirements Only
By default, the Conflict Risk Heatmap shows the conflict risk “heat” using all student course data, which includes both Pathway requirements and Pathway choices (course groups). You may want to view the heatmap from the perspective of ONLY course requirements. (BTW, this is the data used to determine Time Change Candidates)
View the Potential Conflicts
When using the Conflict Risk Heatmap to investigate potential time conflicts, it’s natural to want to understand with which other course options are you creating the possible conflicts for your students. To view this information, simply click on the time on the heatmap you want to learn more about.
The list of courses and their sections is displayed. For each course, the number of total seats being offered, along with the number of sections in conflict at the selected time, is provided. Using this information, it’s possible to get an idea of how impactful the conflict may be for the student population that needs to take your course.
View a Single Student’s Potential Conflicts
After drilling in on a specific course to view the Conflict Risk Heatmap, you may want to research an individual student’s conflict risk based on the section choices available to them for the courses planned by Predict.
While viewing the course details, click on the Students tab. Find and click on the name of a student you would like to view. Click the Schedule tab to view their conflict risk for the term in question.
Time-Based Student Conflict Risk Training Video
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