Pratt Institute Cuts Time Spent on Curriculum Proposal Process by 90%
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Institutional Overview
Location: Brooklyn, NY
SIS: Ellucian Colleague - Ethos
Early Outcomes
- Reduced the time to approve non-content curriculum changes by nearly 90%, from 3-6 months to two weeks
- Reduced the time to assign rooms for the course schedule by more than 66%, from three weeks to less than a week
- Experienced a huge uptick in submissions of previously backlogged curriculum proposals when the curriculum module launched
New Curriculum Workflows Dramatically Reduce Backlog of Proposals & Time to Approval
Prior to implementing Coursedog’s curriculum management module, Pratt Institute primarily managed curriculum proposals over email, making it difficult to see a high-level overview of where changes were at. As a result, proposals often got stuck.
Now, Pratt leverages curriculum workflows that provide transparency into what stage a proposal is in. For non-content curriculum changes that use an expedited workflow, it used to take 3-6 months for approval. Now with Coursedog it only takes approximately two weeks for approval, reducing the time to approval by nearly 90%.
Non-content curriculum proposals were approved 9x faster after Pratt adopted Coursedog.
Similarly, the time to approve provisional courses drastically decreased. It used to take Pratt approximately four months to approve provisional courses, but they are now able to approve these courses in four weeks with the new workflow.
When Pratt launched the curriculum workflows, they also experienced a huge uptick in curriculum proposals submitted. In the seven months since launching the new curriculum tool, they’ve completed 144 curriculum requests and have 167 currently in the pipeline. One department went so far as to submit 60 curriculum requests in a couple of weeks. According to registrar Luke Phillips, “there were things that had been nagging them for years, but there was no good mechanism to get through to us. It was taking years to get done, but now it got done in weeks.”
Time to Assign Rooms for the Course Schedule Reduced by Over 66%
Historically, Pratt Institute used online google sheets to create the course schedule. However, this manual process made it hard to track changes and schedule rooms properly. Now, the real-time room inventory in Coursedog allows departments to choose a room in real-time and avoid double bookings. While it used to take three weeks to assign rooms and was an all hands on deck effort, now it takes less than a week.
“The old method used to cause a lot of anxiety and miscommunication. Now, the new system encourages people to do things early because they can get what they want. It isn’t just efficiency for us, but also for the departments. It has had a very positive ripple effect.” - Luke Phillips, Registrar
Integration Between the SIS and Events Module Yields Over 1,400 Requests Within the First Five Months
Under a previous system, Pratt struggled with transparency around room availability. Their old tool wasn’t truly integrated with their SIS which resulted in problems and didn’t allow them to run comprehensive reports.
Now, the Coursedog Events module is integrated with Pratt’s SIS, creating one source of truth. In the five months since launching the events module, Pratt received over 1,400 requests. Registrar Luke Phillips attributes this strong user adoption ot the intuitive nature of Coursedog:
“It is very intuitive to use. We have some other software products that aren’t easy to use and it is hard to get people to use them. We’ve found with Coursedog that they are intuitive to use and to set-up.”
