Building a Student-Centered Tech Ecosystem at Isothermal Community College

For many community college leaders, the heavy lift of digital transformation is often deferred in favor of other initiatives. However, Dr. Greg Thomas, Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs at Isothermal Community College, recently led his institution through a comprehensive overhaul of their entire academic operations ecosystem. By integrating academic scheduling, event scheduling, curriculum management, the college catalog, and syllabi management, the college aimed to replace fragmented processes with a cohesive, data-driven framework.

Dr. Thomas explained that implementing the new platform, Coursedog, meant “revising nearly every background academic process—from how courses are created to how curriculum proposals are reviewed. It was a heavy lift, requiring coordination across departments, intensive training, and a willingness to reimagine long-standing practices.” While this foundational shift was aimed at reducing administrative burden, the primary goal was to better serve students. “Ultimately, everything we're doing is to make the school experience better for the students,” Thomas emphasized.  

Prioritizing Schedule Predictability for Adult Students

When asked about the biggest value gained from Isothermal’s overhaul, Dr. Thomas immediately pointed to the course schedule and academic calendar. “The benefit is it allows us to see the schedule more holistically. To see where there are overlaps, where there are roadblocks, and correct for those. So putting everything into [Coursedog] scheduling allowed us to build a better schedule, but also to be more efficient in building the schedule,” Thomas explains.

The efficiencies mentioned by Dr. Thomas don’t just enable administrators to create a more accurate schedule, but also allows Isothermal to build a schedule visible a full year in advance. For the college's population of adult students located in a rural area, this foresight is a necessity rather than a luxury.

“For our audience, our rural community college with a lot of non-traditional students, it allows them the time to go to their employers, to go to their child care providers, and to say, ‘Look, I know what my schedule is going to look like for the next year. Can we plan around that?’ It also allows them to paint a better picture of what it's going to take for them to complete in a timely manner,” says Thomas. This shift ensures that the college offers a “schedule that not only is available in advance, but is accurate and dependable.”

Driving Curricular Agility Through Transparency & Workflows

Before Isothermal’s academic operations overhaul, the college managed curriculum changes through a paper-based process that required a 12-page document for any program modification. This arduous process meant that even small, necessary updates could take months to finalize.

By moving to a fully online, workflow-based tool, Isothermal now has a more holistic understanding of their curricular repository and how potential changes impact program structure. “The connection between being able to see side-by-side comparisons of program changes in real time and to be able to tie that back into what we've already built with scheduling means that we can think about the curriculum choices we're making and how that fits into our scheduling so that it's one cohesive piece as we're planning to meet our students' needs,” Thomas notes.

This efficiency is particularly critical for programs like early childhood education, which feature multiple tracks serving small populations. Offering a large number of track-specific courses that garner small enrollments can be resourcing-intensive for small institutions. Consequently, evaluating the curriculum to minimize differences while still offering some choice to small student populations is a delicate balance. A transparent view into how these differences play out across both the curriculum and course schedule is critical for resource-conscious institutions in today’s environment.

It’s also important to not only be able to see this information, but to be able to act quickly on it. Thomas notes that new efficiency in their curricular approval process has allowed them to approve changes that previously wouldn’t have made the deadline. Recently, Isothermal processed 100 curricular changes in a single semester, a substantial increase from the 30 to 40 typically completed previously in the same time period.

Scaling Success with Accelerated Terms and Strategic Course Pairings

Alongside Isothermal’s technology transformation, they were simultaneously implementing other student-facing structural changes. In a significant shift, the college increased the number of courses offered in accelerated 8-week terms, up from 17% of courses to 80%. The move aims to close equity gaps and address the realities of today’s students. However, this move requires a high degree of precision in how courses are paired.

“You wouldn't want to have your most difficult class be in the second 8 weeks of the fall semester, because the holidays interrupt it. Being able to use those analytics to say, ‘These students are seeing success in these pairings. Or: ‘Are these pairings being offered at this time of the year?’ It's going to allow us to take something that has been a huge success for us, and fine-tune it,” says Thomas.

Intentional course pairing is also foundational to another one of Isothermal’s current initiatives: rolling out program maps as a part of their guided pathways work. To help build program maps, the college developed a homegrown mapping tool for faculty that incorporates specific progression rules. For example, foundational English and math courses are locked into the first year of a student’s map. “You can put them anywhere you want in the first year of the map, but you can't push them off to the second year. This is a best practice for students because those are foundational courses that affect how they will perform in other courses,” says Thomas.

The integration of these tools has directly influenced the faculty’s engagement with curriculum design. Thomas observes that “as a result of that map-making process. We've seen more curriculum changes put in this semester than we've seen in my time with the college.” This level of engagement ensures that the academic offerings remain aligned with the accelerated pace of the new term structures.

Leveraging Career Clusters to Scale AI Integration

As part of their guided pathways work, Isothermal organized programs into seven distinct career clusters. These clusters aren’t just helpful for student exploration, but serve as a framework for introducing artificial intelligence into the curriculum. Creating AI-specific courses across 70 individual programs is unrealistic for most small teams, but scaling that effort across seven clusters makes the task achievable. This structure allows the college to specialize instruction for specific sub-sections of the student body without overextending resources.

“Career clusters allow us to group like-minded programs, and then you're only developing seven versions of the AI course that can touch on those different fields,” Thomas explains. This targeted approach ensures that the technology is taught through the lens of a student's chosen profession. “The idea is to teach them applicable uses to the field they want to go into. That's true before AI, right? It's always been best practice that the more you can touch on the field of interest for a student... the better likelihood they have that they will be successful in that course.”

Ultimately, the goal is to move beyond basic literacy and focus on meaningful application. “If you were to teach a course about how to use ChatGPT, you're gonna lose the entire student audience, because they already know that. We have to rethink how we teach and how we assess their knowledge in a way that allows them to use it [AI], but still allows them to learn.”

However, tailoring the curriculum to these clusters requires precise academic operations to ensure students can actually access these specialized sections. Thomas notes that managing the scheduling needs of ten different programs within a single cluster remains logistically complex. “Having tools to help make that work easier means we're able to deliver on that promise to students better,” he says.

Fostering Shared Ownership and Data Accessibility

Institutional change of this magnitude requires more than just new software; it requires a cultural shift. Thomas intentionally avoids the term "buy-in," preferring to cultivate "shared ownership" among faculty and staff. “I think the only way that you can get real massive change is to start from a shared why. With every one of the changes that we've had to make around academics, we have to start with ‘This is what we're thinking about doing, and this is how we see it benefiting students.’ And if people believe that sharing students is the goal of the change, you get shared ownership.”

Central to this culture is the democratization of data. The Institutional Research (IR) team at Isothermal facilitates this by holding regular one-to-one meetings with program leads to review assessment data and close the loop on program improvements. The IR team also monitors KPIs for accelerated terms and breaks down student success metrics across 16 demographic groups, turning academic operations data into a proactive tool for equity. This data-informed approach allows for "modifications on a rolling basis every year," which Thomas credits for the college's ability to "really step up our game in terms of educational offerings."

While the IR team drives this work, Thomas notes that data should be readily accessible to all. “Accessibility doesn't just have to be who has the login. Accessibility is my ability to take that data and have it mean something. The more a tool can turn that [data] into a useful product, the more that data is going to be used,” Thomas explains.

Scaling the Impact of a Unified Academic Operations Strategy

As Isothermal Community College looks toward the future, their continued success lies in the synergy between technology and the people who use it. “The reason Coursedog works for us is because it's a bunch of different tools that have a common backbone. The reason that stands out for us is because that's how our team works. We've got a bunch of different parts, and only because they work well together are they as effective as they are,” Thomas explains.