Overview of Academic Planning Processes
The Academic Planning Database (APD), built in the college’s Salesforce org, is used daily by faculty leadership and college administration for:
- Course planning for all of the college’s degree programs
- Communications hub for tracking of historical course planning decisions, and for disseminating information to faculty leadership and college/school administration
- Tracking of instructor teaching relief (adjustments) for sabbaticals, leaves, editorships, extension/outreach, and administrative appointments
- Tracking of instructor teaching commitments, including extra compensation for overload teaching
- Tracking of banked courses for instructors
- Tracking of visiting instructor information used by HR for faculty appointments
Additionally, all teaching faculty access APD information at various points throughout the year, through the FastApps Salesforce website:
- Regular faculty have access to their Teaching and Research Support Summary dashboard throughout the year
- All instructors have access to the Faculty Class Review, where they can provide scheduling and enrollment management information to the school registrars to help with roster creation
Finally, the data we store in the APD is extremely valuable to college leadership:
- Teaching data for faculty hiring prioritization decisions is pulled from historical and planning year information in the APD
- APD data directly informs reappointment, promotion, and SIP decisions during faculty annual reviews
- Dozens of ad-hoc reports using APD information are requested each year, with the number growing yearly. The longer we have this source of high-quality, the more uses the college leadership finds for it.
Use this link to get to the Step-by-step instructions for using the Academic Planning tool.
What updates automatically in APD
When you create or edit records
| When this happens |
APD does this |
| A course is created or updated |
Fills in the course name and teaching units, and sets the class owner to the area coordinator |
| A class is created |
Fills in the session code, class owner, name, catalog number, teaching units and title from its course |
| A class's term, session, degree or teaching units change |
Updates the class to match |
| A class's Dean Decision is set to Remove |
Removes the class's participants (instructors) |
| A teaching commitment is created |
Fills in the instructor name and year |
On a schedule
| What |
When |
| Prior Year Enrollment is calculated on classes |
Weekday mornings at 6 AM |
| Each course's Chatter Last Modified date is updated from its latest Chatter post |
Every hour |
| FastApps access for the Faculty Class Review and Faculty Summary Letters |
Every Sunday night |
| The Faculty Class Review and Faculty Summary Letter email lists are updated from faculty records |
Weekly |
Loaded or run by the Salesforce team
- Course evaluations. Hotel, Johnson and Dyson course and instructor evaluation results are loaded into APD for each class and its instructors. This isn't automatic. Ask when a term's results are ready.
- APD Compare. The college's classes and their assigned instructors, including cross-listed classes, are loaded from the university's student data mart into a CRM Analytics view for the Academic Planning group.
- Annual rollover. Each year's data is copied forward to the next planning year. See Annual APD Rollover.
Additional Resources