Higher education institutions are vying to attract students as they face a potential enrollment cliff over the coming years. In this competitive landscape, one decisive factor in your institution’s success is its instructional capacity — its ability to provide a high-quality educational experience to as many students as its educational resources can support.
However, this capacity is multifaceted, and creating the most impactful learning experience for each student while maintaining or growing enrollment numbers requires optimizing your educational resources for excellence and efficiency. This guide explores the tools and strategies your institution needs to build instructional capacity.
Instructional capacity measures the resources your institution has and the educational experiences you can create by using them. You can take a quantitative view of instructional capacity, measuring the maximum number of students your institution could teach effectively, or a qualitative view, measuring the educational value you can deliver to each student.
Institutional resources are the building blocks of instructional capacity. Resources that contribute to instructional capacity include:
To choose the ideal strategies for enhancing instructional capacity at your institution, you need an accurate assessment of your current capacity, the resources contributing to it, and how effectively you’re using those resources. Your institution can track several metrics and KPIs to understand your instructional capacity.
This is a traditional metric for instructional capacity and quality control. Many institutions put a program-wide or institution-wide cap on student-to-faculty ratios to ensure instructional quality, meaning recruiting more faculty members is necessary to create capacity for increased student enrollment.
Institutions with fewer students to each faculty member can offer a personalized learning experience and have room for growth. Those with higher student-to-faculty ratios may need to recruit more lecturers or adapt the instructional mode to increase their capacity while preserving educational quality.
To calculate average student credit hours (SCH) per lecturer, add the total number of program credit hours all your students complete and divide the sum by the number of instructors. Whereas faculty-to-student ratios help predict your faculty’s potential to engage students, tracking average SCH highlights the real teaching productivity your lecturers are achieving.
Average class size is a conventional metric for instructional capacity and quality. Assuming smaller classes allow for high-quality, personalized engagement and that most classes will be close to average size, a lower average class size indicates that your institution has the capacity to deliver quality instruction and potentially enroll more students.
Some institutions have courses with much higher enrollment numbers than others. In this case, there’s less value in considering average class sizes. Student distribution across course sizes reveals how many of your students are in large, average, and small classes.
Looking at the classes in each of these categories can help your institution ensure the more popular courses get the resource allocation they need to improve the student experience while exploring how to attract more students to courses that haven’t reached capacity.
Maximum section size refers to the maximum number of students your institution can have taking a class together at any given time. Factors influencing maximum section size include teaching quality standards and available room size. If your campus has larger classrooms or hybrid instruction and your lecturers use methods like project-based learning (PBL) to engage larger groups effectively, your institution will have a larger maximum section size and a greater instructional capacity.
This requires balance, though, as many institutions cap maximum class size to ensure personalized attention remains available for each student. Multisection schedules where two sets of students take the same course during the same semester but in different time slots can help keep class sizes small enough for quality engagement.
Some institutions may lean on multisection solutions too heavily, splitting sections sooner than educational quality and infrastructure require. This can lead to institutions investing twice the necessary teaching work hours. When fewer sections could deliver a similar-quality learning experience to each student, consolidating sections saves time, money, and space.
Analyzing how full each section is compared to its capacity can help faculties identify these consolidation opportunities to maximize instructional capacity. On the other hand, where this analysis reveals sections that are full beyond capacity, splitting them can improve educational quality.
Your course completion and graduation rates can indicate how close your courses are to their capacity. If these rates exceed your targets for a course, that course likely has room for more students. If a course is underperforming in these dimensions, it may be beyond capacity, though other factors could contribute to poor completion rates.
You can calculate this KPI by dividing your total budget for teaching and student support by your institution’s student population. You can also run this calculation at the program or class level and compare courses.
If you know the average cost to take a student from enrollment to graduation while meeting your quality standards, you can gauge how much instructional capacity your institution has from a financial viewpoint compared to present enrollment. Access to additional revenue or improving the cost-efficiency of instruction in your programs can enhance your instructional capacity.
A high retention rate is a strong indicator of effective teaching, reliable support, and satisfied students. Programs with excellent retention rates likely have room to expand, while programs with poor retention rates may lack the capacity to serve the students already enrolled.
Student satisfaction scores often correlate with retention rates, and these scores can also help you understand your instructional capacity. Course evaluations and student surveys are effective tools for monitoring student satisfaction as an instructional capacity KPI. Incorporate various question types to check how students feel about:
Instructional capacity is the product of the resources you have and how well you use them to accommodate students. This means you can build instructional capacity by expanding your resources or achieving a greater impact with those you have. The following are 10 of the most effective and scalable strategies for improving instructional capacity.
While recruiting more lecturers can help, professional development initiatives can improve capacity by empowering faculty to become more effective and efficient at their work. Earning an institutional reputation for professional development opportunities can also help attract and retain top faculty.
Beyond the classroom, a growing student population needs a broad range of support resources to succeed. Investing in these resources can equip your institution to serve a larger, more diverse student community. Key student support resources for building instructional capacity include:
Flexible teaching modes and schedules can help your institution accommodate more students from diverse backgrounds. If your institution incorporates some online or nighttime courses, nontraditional students with work or family responsibilities could attend without affecting the space and time available for traditional classes.
The less time your administrators, teaching faculty, and students need to spend on admin processes, the more scalable those processes become. Explore software to accelerate enrollment, faculty credentialing, accreditation reporting, data collection, and other institutional processes.
Curriculum mapping is a tool for continuous curriculum improvement that can enhance student success, course completion, and, in turn, instructional capacity. To implement curriculum mapping for optimal results, you can:
Instructional capacity often varies from one program to another, so program-specific data can highlight courses where resources are most needed and those where available resources are underutilized. These insights can guide more strategic resource allocation. For example:
Strategic marketing campaigns can highlight success stories and the excellent student experience in your programs. Focus your marketing efforts on any programs currently below capacity. The additional revenue from increased enrollment in these programs can help bolster your faculty, technologies, and infrastructure in courses where capacity is lagging.
Expanding or renovating lecture venues to accommodate more or larger classes can enhance instructional capacity. These projects can be expensive and time-consuming, though, so explore opportunities to expand digital infrastructure as well. Your institution’s digital infrastructure could include an LMS, virtual classrooms, cloud storage for course materials, and digital assessment tools.
Identify the KPIs most relevant to your capacity-building strategies and implement systems to collect, organize, and analyze data related to these KPIs. For example, instructional capacity correlates with grades, retention, satisfaction, graduation rates, and other key metrics that innovative student success software can help your institution track. By analyzing these data points, you can discover the programs most in need of increased instructional capacity and the resources most critical to helping these programs grow.
Software tools are among your institution’s most scalable resources, and choosing the right tools can improve the quality and efficiency of faculty work. To optimize instructional capacity, look for software solutions that help you:
The journey to optimal instructional capacity can be a complex one. It requires insights into every resource your institution has and effective strategies for mobilizing these resources to serve students. If your institution needs data-driven insights for optimized instructional capacity, partner with Watermark.
The Watermark Educational Impact Suite (EIS) is a cutting-edge software toolkit with solutions for student success, course evaluations, curriculum planning, assessments, accreditation, and professional development. All these tools integrate with your existing digital infrastructure and one another for a smooth, centralized experience. Navigating from a single platform, your administrative, teaching, and support staff can access clear insights to serve a growing student population.
Contact us for a free demo of the EIS to discover new horizons for instructional capacity at your institution.
