Being on the waitlist is no longer a war of attrition for students trying to hang on as new sections gradually open.
High demand classes with full waitlists are being cloned in order to accommodate more students and their needs. Cloning courses would allow students to keep the same time frame for which they enrolled.
Dr. Mink Stavenga, Dean of Instructional Support Services, said it started about a year ago.
“We had planned and anticipated that Proposition 30 would not pass,” he said. “Fortunately it did, but we had planned that we would not have many courses in the spring and no courses in the summer. By this time we had already prepared our spring schedule, so we needed to catch up because now we had the opportunity to offer more classes.”
Stavenga said he and his staff examined demand.
“We looked and found some classes that had full waitlists, in some cases 100 and in an extreme case 200 students were on the combined waitlist of all of the sections,” he said. “We started in the spring and we were so successful that we continued to process to this date. One course opened up and within five minutes it was full.”
Kathy Tyner, Vice President for Academic Affairs, said cloning is a response to student interest.
“We wanted to be able to open up classes where we thought there was a good likelihood that the classes would fill,” she said. “Not just at the Chula Vista campus, but the entire district to see that all of the classes, no matter where they were offered, were filled.”
Tyner said the strategy is working well for students.
“I think we added 11 classes last spring,” she said. “The process that we use is a really good process. They identify the courses, they talk to the dean to get a staff member to teach the class and then Dr. Stavenga’s office would send out an email to the students saying that we were going to open this class. We give a pre-notification to the students on the waitlist and we encourage them to register immediately or as quickly as you can in order to get that class.”
Tyner said the deans need to be directly involved with working with their department chairs to see if an instructor was available.
“We don’t want to open up a class until we’re sure we have somebody to teach it,” she said.
One thing that is difficult during this process is that there are certain blocks of time that are popular with students, said Tyner.
“Between eight o’clock in the morning until about noon or one o’clock in the afternoon, or primetime — essentially in any given semester — there is virtually no open classrooms during that time block,” she said. “If there’s no room available on the same day, it is very difficult to clone that class.”
The greatest numbers of classes added are online courses because they do not require a classroom, Tyner said.
“We specifically added courses that were in the math, English and the communication areas because we know historically there is a huge demand in those areas,” she said. “We want to be very prescriptive in what we add so that we add the courses specifically for the student needs.”
Dr. Angelica Suarez, Vice President for Student Affairs, said cloned classes should also support degree attainment or transfer.
“We changed the process by which the waitlist process was going to be done because we heard a lot of concerns from students,” she said. “If you are on a waitlist for a class and a slot becomes open, you will get an email from the college that says there is a space and you have three days to register for the class and have to pay for your classes.”
Suarez urged students to update their contact information on Web Advisor and meet with a counselor to complete an educational plan.
“If you know what your path is going to look like, you are more likely to complete it,” she said.