Student Program Finder
Screenshots and links coming soon, this is a work in progress,
The Problem: Students enroll in courses but are not assigned to programs. Surprisingly, graduation rates depend on students enrolling in and completing programs.
Additional problems: At my level of skill and permissions, Informer doesn’t seem capable of doing large reviews of student courses. In general, reporting from STUDENT.ACAD.CRED (the screen where each student instance of every course they’ve taken or transferred) are database-destroying grinds. I haven’t been able to design an Informer report that has enough juice to review course data, student data, and program requirements simultaneously.
So, the journey.
0. Familiarize yourself with the STUDENT.PROGRAM and STUDENT.ACAD.CRED tables.
You’ll probably need to pull existing or live student programs from the student’s record, so you can exclude successfully added programs or related programs. And this journey relies on reporting on recently-added student courses, which live in STUDENT.ACAD.CRED.
- Allies and existing processes.
Database magic only goes so far. To whatever degree possible, human solutions or database solutions help. In our institution advisors, department admins, and recruiters have some ability to add STUDENT.PROGRAM records using the SACP screen. In some instances, students can add some programs themselves through our Student Services gateway or through Salesforce black magic. An award that’s added by someone who understands the student’s needs is generally more reliable than one that’s added through automagic process. And it’s one less award to add.
Encourage allies to learn to add programs and review them in EVAL, and help them learn the program processes. If possible, ask departments to provide lists of new students and lists of complete students.
There is a lot of information stored in student applications (SHAP), which records a students’ hopes, wishes, dreams, goals, and gender. Among other things. I confess I haven’t used APPLICATIONS data in my work yet, a part of me doesn’t trust self-reported data.
2. Understanding your Awards
My approach to this task is to build lists of courses and query against them for new enrollees. This works very well for small awards that don’t share courses with other awards, and not so well with programs with course overlap (our “Medical Office Support,” “Medical Administrative,” and “Medical Billing and Coding” awards are hard to handle, in particular, as all three have shared courses, and not the same shared courses.
It’s helpful to review your programs for shared coursework, course numbers that are unique to a specific award, and, importantly, any awards you can avoid reviewing or awards with strong support teams who can lift some of the weight.
2. Identifying Courses
Much to the IT department’s distress, every week I run a report of all courses added during the current semester, including transfer coursework. I save these in a SLED (see Saved Lists/SLED), and it is a big one.
My parameters:
– Report is based on STUDENT.ACAD.CRED (the course records tied to each student).
– Recent student courses added or transferred within the current semester. This particular filter needs to be updated every semester or suddenly there are no students.
– Within the grade scheme I’m reviewing (I work with Continuing Education courses primarily and restrict my review to CE courses only, and I may need to exclude other categories like Developmental courses)
– Filters for valid courses (among other things, I don’t want to include dropped or cancelled courses or withdraws under some circumstances…check your grade scheme and college standards here. You may want to exclude courses that were audited or transferred from another institution.)
Once a week–or however often I want to review this data–I have an automatic Informer report that exports these to a SLED (we’ll call it CURRCRSE).
3. Program blocks:
Once I’ve established this living, fresh SLED, I have one Informer report per program/award that skims the saved list of courses for courses that may be relevant.
– Based on STUDENTS
– Filters: Exclude students who have the award in question in an active or graduated status (I’m debating whether to exclude cancelled programs as well, based on current completion-reporting issues.) Essentially, if I’m reviewing WELDING.BA, I want to exclude students who already have WELDING.BA. I might also exclude students in the BLKSMITH.CERT award. In some cases, such as when I’m reviewing the three closely related Medical programs, I may want to exclude students with any of the three medical programs and an Active/Graduated status.
– A “Select/Returning” filter that looks for students who have taken courses relevant to the program. Select/Returning pulls data from an unrelated table. In this case, I’ll be asking for the IDs of students returned from the filtered results of the CURRCRSE saved list. “Is the student taking any of WLDG-1301, WLDG-1305, and/or WLDG-1313? If so, pass their student ID on to the primary query.”
Report Results:
I usually request the report return the columns: Student ID, Student Name, Active Student Programs (it sometimes provides useful information on patterns or other people’s mistakes), and a formula column that returns the program name/ID (“WELDING.BA”).
Informer’s automatic reporting will email me a spreadsheet once a week with the results of this report. IT has asked me to spread these out over the course of a week.
4. Result Review:
With over 100 programs, this can be a grim ordeal, particularly during peak registration period. If a program has one or two potential new students, I’ll check them in SACP (Student Academic Programs). If there’s several, I’ll create a saved list of the results and use BPRP (Batch Review of Potential Programs) to pull fake audits for each student and see if they’re valid. Once I’ve verified that these students belong in their program I’ll add them, usually with a start date a week prior.
We have a custom process for batch-adding programs based on a saved list of student ID#s, I’m not sure if an official screen exists for this process or not.