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Ocotillo Spotlight on Instructional Technology... is a monthly electronic newsletter that highlights an innovative use of technology at one of the Maricopa Community Colleges.

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Ocotillo Spotlight on Instructional Technology

Note: The Ocotillo Spotlight is no longer published, but all previous issues will remain on this site.

spotlight for January 2005
For the January 2005 Ocotillo Spotlight we highlight a technology developed at South Mountain Community College to extract data from the Maricopa Student Information System (SIS) and "transform" into a format used by adminstration and division chairs for managing programs, coordinate planning, and to document information for program reviews.

South Mountain Community College Decision Support Shadow System

written by Ken Roberts, Dean of Instruction, South Mountain Community College

At South Mountain we have created and made broad use of a FileMaker Pro 5.5 "shadow" system. This shadow system allow us to quickly manipulate information contained within the current Student Information System (SIS). We are also able to "customize" our SIS data files with course notes. Having this system available to support our schedule development process, assist with faculty payroll, assists with our decisions to offer or cancel sections, and provide much of the information used by faculty in performing yearly Program Reviews.

During the course of a typical semester, the Dean of Instruction works closely with the Division Chairs and other faculty members on a number of tasks involving the class schedule, student enrollment, faculty payroll, and facility use issues. All of these tasks are dependent upon information which can be efficiently use to support decision making and planning. Typically, much of this information comes for the existing Student Information System (SIS) records.

Extracting data from SIS is not always easy. A number of fixed query programs have been developed to pull information from the SIS records but these fixed programs are not responsive to unique questions which need to be answered. SMCC's "shadow" system which provides information needed by the Dean of Instruction and the Division Chairs as they manage instructional programs. The shadow system pulls information from SIS using a CuteFTP program and translates the SIS data to FileMaker Pro 5.5 program format. FileMaker Pro helps us to query and create many reports from the SIS data.

The SIS system provides information such as course enrollment, canceled sections, FTSE production, staffing, faculty load information, classroom uses, start and end dates, plus other data which may be entered by college staff when schedules are developed. When the class schedule is prepared at South Mountain Community College, a number of supplemental "note codes" are added to the section records. For example, courses which are part of the ACE Program have the note "A+" added to them. The dual enrollment courses offered by the college receive the note code "+Q". We have separate note codes for our Dynamic Learning Teacher Education Program, ESL Program, special third party programs, and a range of unique SMCC program offerings.

In addition, when developing our class, schedule general education values are loaded to the FileMaker Pro database by us. We take Course Applicability System (CAS) web site as our reference site when we load the values. Courses have notes to reflect all the general education values in place each semester. Elective values are not noted in our coding. However, we can identify each course in a given semester that has cultural value, historical value, numeric value, etc. These notes are adjusted when there are changes in the course bank resulting from curricular additions, deletions, and modifications.

We make use of the FileMaker Pro 5.5 shadow system to support a number of on going operations at the college. In some cases, the use is fairly informal but provides needed data. For example, in preparing the schedule for Fall 06, we can quickly query the system to determine how many courses we offered off campus and at what location, during the evening, with humanities value, on any given day. We can also quickly review the number of sections with course numbers of 200 and above to determine our scheduling pattern and cancellation rates by start times, teaching locations, by discipline, etc. Such data helps to identify voids in our schedule. Having this data has been helpful in reviewing our class schedule and identifying where we have concentrations of give courses and areas where we need to add additional class types. This form of query is helpful each semester when we are working on class schedule development. The database is maintained in the Dean of Instruction's office, and the Chairs are able to request information to help with their schedule preparation.

The system can also be used to quickly evaluate the start dates of scheduled classes. At SMCC we have worked to add many more "late start" classes, and we use the system to give us information about what is offered during any given week in the semester. These informal queries can be completed quickly and easily using a desktop computer.

We can query SIS information each Monday to provide a listing of the classes scheduled to begin in the next two weeks using a FileMaker Pro program. The report requested provides the start date of each course, indicates if there is a faculty member scheduled to teach the courses, shows the location of the course and the student enrollment. This report runs in conjunction with the payroll audit. This data is used to make decisions whether to keep or cancel courses. The data helps us to monitor our payroll audit and ensure we have faculty scheduled for payroll for their entire teaching load. Having this system in place has improved our efficiency and accuracy with the payroll process. At SMCC, we now have courses that begin each week of the semester and have over 250 late start sections per semester. Having this system as part of our standard Payroll Audit Process works every well for us and has reduced errors.

The screen below is a sample of the report we generate to monitor our late start sections. This screen is one of many that relate to the given audit period of October 9 through October 22, 2004. This report indicates there are a few sections with low enrollment which need to be cancelled. It shows one section with minimal enrollment but a small teaching load. This section would be questioned to determine if it should be offered. There are also two concurrent sections listed and the loaded section enrollment would be taken into consideration to determine if this course should be offered.

Sample screen for the Audit query

We also make use of the system to support the formal faculty Program Review process conducted each year. The SMCC Program Review process requires that identified programs such as our ACE, Storytelling, Dynamic Learning, ESL, and Developmental Education be evaluated yearly. In addition, all occupational programs as well as the general education programs are evaluated on a yearly basis. Using this system, faculty teams responsible for each program received information from the beginning of the semester, at 45th day, and at the end of the semester about their program. The produced program data includes FTSE, numbers of sections offered, number of section canceled, class size, RFP and Adjunct staffing numbers, classrooms used, and other information. This data is used to respond to an established Program Review report template. This process ensures faculty have accurate information about program data element when completing their report and narrative summaries.

The example below is one of approximately 20 pages which contains semester data regarding the HU general education program course information. The report provides all the information necessary for faculty to complete the data analysis for their Program Review report. Faculty also use the data when completing their narrative reports about the program.

Sample Program Review screen for HU General Education query

The screen below is another example of a report provided for the Program Review process at SMCC. The previous screen reflected a report used for "General Education" programs at the college. The next screen is used for a more traditional program, English as a Second Language. These courses are sorted based on the course ID rather than by a note code added to the SIS data files. In both cases, the reports contain all the data faculty need to respond to the Program Review process and to help support their development of the narrative sections of the review.

Sample screen for ESL Program query