Business Operations
Problem
Before I joined the Warren Writing Program (WCWP), course offerings decisions were made on memory of historical offerings. Recognizing a gap, I began a project to collect and analyze actual student demand of these courses.
As I was working on this project, 3 lecturers left the program. This increased the urgency and necessity to have accurate idea of student demand.
Research
I built 3 dashboards in Tableau with student information, tracking how many students had passed our courses, were currently enrolled, or had not yet enrolled.
I built a 5+ year enrollment tracker, and aggregated the information in Excel for easy access and interpretation (pictured).
Results
I found a 200+ student gap that had slowly been building between our supply vs. student demand of courses. In other words, 14% of students were not able to clear their general education requirement in a timely manner. With 3 instructors leaving, the gap was increased to 29%.
To fill this gap, we changed the program model from lecturer-based to a mix of lecturers and Teaching Assistants (TA). We increased long-term staffing by 1 lecture and 3-5 Teaching Assistants.