The Office of the Provost and the Office of the Registrar welcome nominations (including self-nominations) of individuals to serve on an ad hoc College-wide Schedule Grid Advisory Committee. The committee will include representation from all five schools, key campus offices, students, and Faculty Council and will facilitate an inclusive process for refining and recommending a new, shared schedule grid for Fall 2023 implementation.
As many members of our staff and faculty will recall, the development of a common academic schedule grid (i.e., the published, conventional start/end times for undergraduate courses) was identified as a priority objective for the campus in Year One of the Ithaca Forever Strategic Plan implementation. An action group of faculty and staff was charged in 2019-2020 with the development of this new common grid, but the action group first committed to examining a range of existing data sources and to collecting new evidence that would help them better understand the problems/issues a new grid would be seeking to address.
The action group collected information directly from department chairs and students, examined time override requests and other relevant workflow reports, examined course schedules across the College, and reviewed earlier efforts to introduce new grids at the campus.
The group’s work was interrupted by the pandemic, prior to the stage in which focus groups were convened, but their work was restarted by the Office of the Registrar and the Office of the Provost after the distribution of the Shape of the College, which reaffirmed and accelerated the need for a schedule grid revision. Designated 4-credit time bands are not present in the schedule grid we presently observe, except for the addition of a “fourth hour.” In the late spring and summer 2021, a variety of faculty, student, and staff stakeholders were consulted in meetings for input about goals they hoped a new schedule grid could help address.
At this time, we seek members of an advisory committee to support the next steps in the process. If you are interested in serving on this committee, or you would like to nominate someone else for consideration, please send an email indicating interest to provost@ithaca.edu by December 6th. Committee members will be notified by December 10th in order to coordinate spring meeting schedules. Most of the work of this committee is expected to be completed in Spring 2022.