Feedback Toolkit

Quantitative data can tell you what is happening in your course schedule, but not why. Understanding the lived experiences behind the numbers (how students actually make enrollment decisions, what constraints shape faculty preferences, and where hidden barriers slow progress toward graduation) is essential to designing changes that work.

The resources included here draw on best practices from the AASCU Student-Centered Course Scheduling initiative to help institutions gather meaningful, actionable input from both faculty and students. Collecting this input early builds empathy, surfaces potential barriers before they derail reform, and creates the shared ownership needed to move the work forward.

WHAT’S INCLUDED?

This toolkit offers multiple ways to gather that input across contexts—surveys, focus groups, classrooms, and campus events—pairing structured responses with open-ended insight to inform student-centered, data-informed scheduling improvements.

• Faculty Survey: A 10-question survey to understand faculty scheduling preferences and constraints, identify where flexibility exists, and surface assumptions about student needs that may align or conflict with actual demand.
• Faculty Focus Group Guide: A facilitated discussion guide structured around faculty scheduling needs, their observations of student barriers, and their likely responses to potential schedule changes.
• Student Survey: A 10-question survey to understand how students make scheduling decisions, what constraints shape their choices, and where the current schedule creates barriers to progress.
• Student Focus Group Guide: A facilitated discussion guide that moves from decision-making and tradeoffs to specific enrollment barriers and what changes would make the biggest difference.
• In-Class Poll: A quick 3–5 minute activity (raise-your-hand or polling tech) to surface scheduling stress and common constraints across an entire classroom in real time.
• Event Table Activity: A hands-on campus event format where students choose among five sample weekly schedule layouts, revealing preferences and constraints that surveys alone can’t capture.