Organizations seek to deploy resources optimally to meet customer demand. In the case of an educational institution offering degree programs, student demand for course offerings may be satisfied by deploying faculty resources according to a long-term course schedule aka the Typical Course Offering Pattern (TCOP).   In previous work [Madan and Gnanendran (2020)], we have proposed a project management approach that views each student’s pathway through the program as a “project” requiring completion of a set of tasks (courses) with each task having a specific duration (semester) and, possibly, precedence requirements (prerequisites).  To make this problem tractable, the approach suggested looking at the problem in the aggregate (i.e., considering cohorts rather than individual students), akin to the well-known Sales & Operations Planning model. The scheduling problem is then equivalent to multi-project management where the institution needs to manage multiple, simultaneous projects with outcomes that are measured on the traditional criteria of time and cost.  Here, we propose an extension based on the agile approach to project management by using an iterative lifecycle with a cadence of one semester, since the TCOP can be dynamically updated at the end of each semester based on the latest information about the progress being made by each cohort with regard to time and cost. We propose course add/delete rules that “reward” high-performing cohorts by offering greater flexibility in course choice, and “punish” low-performing cohorts by offering fewer course options than were in the original TCOP.

Reference

Madan, M.S., and Gnanendran, S.K. (2020). Course Planning in Educational Programs: A Project Management Approach, Operations and Supply Chain Management, 13 (4), pp. 349-358.

Keywords

Course Scheduling, Multi-Project Management, Agile Approach, Iterative Lifecyle, Heuristics.