University curriculums have mostly kept pace with new majors, changing careers, and student interests, but one area that’s been left behind is the class scheduling process. Higher education administrators have done their best to maneuver the inconsistencies, but the back-end of class scheduling is riddled with potential pitfalls, lack of standardization, and lack of transparency.

On today’s episode of the EdTech Podcast, host Daniel Litwin sat down with Michelle Kelley, Registrar at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin and Skip Ernst, Product Manager at DIGARC, to discuss the challenges university registrar offices are facing and the technology solutions available.

“Every semester we create the schedule of courses that’ll be offered and that students register for, but that process has not had a satisfactory software solution to streamline it,” Kelley said, explaining how data is exported to a cumbersome spreadsheet and then manually updated as educators provide information. “There are numerous problems in that process.”

In his work at Florida-based DIGARC, Ernst said that that’s on par with what he hears from many other institutions. “It’s very surprising actually to hear that some are still using paper forms as a de facto standard,” he said.

DIGARC provides cloud-based academic catalog and curriculum management solutions to higher education institutions. Since Edgewood College began using DIGARC’s SECTION solution, the class scheduling process has become simpler and easier for everyone to use.

“In our implementation of the SECTION software, the very first thing that stood out for us was the dashboard,” Kelley said, explaining how the clean dashboard makes it easy for even non-tech savvy people to use. “SECTION provides a great mechanism to accomplish that.”

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