A regional NSW university identified the need to re-design its academic calendar. The existing calendar presented major challenges, including a lack of flexibility for students, a high level of complexity from multiple overlapping calendars, and a lack of efficient utilisation of the calendar year. Over a 12-month period, AptoNow supported the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) and an internal team to diagnose critical issues and objectives, evaluate alternative calendar options, and agree on a preferred model.
Our team enabled the University to take a highly consultative co-design approach, as well as being informed by rigorous modelling and sector good practice
Over a 12-month engagement, AptoNow worked with the client team to identify and evaluate alternative academic calendar options. Key activities included:
Highly collaborative approach with staff and leaders across the University – this included facilitating collaborative project governance, seeking a wide range of staff input including school-specific forums and progressive Town Hall-style updates, and clear messaging throughout.
Deep and meaningful engagement with students on alternative calendar options – facilitated extensive student engagement including student surveys that engaged over 5,000 students in providing feedback, student focus groups with different student segments, and sentiment analysis.
Benchmarking of alternative calendar models around Australia and globally – brought deep insights and case studies from a range of academic calendar transformations to help inform the ultimate design of the University’s new calendar
Rigorous financial modelling of costs and benefits – worked collaboratively to conduct a financial assessment of two key options, transparently identify key costs, and quantify a number of key benefits that provided an attractive 3-5 year payback on the investment.
Iterative refinement process – with continuous feedback loops, AptoNow and the University used an iterative process to test and refine the calendar models. This ensured that the final solutions were both flexible and robust, addressing practical challenges such as workload distribution, course progression, and alignment with industry partners.
Our work enabled the University to align on a new academic calendar, and our engagement style was highly commended.
After previous efforts to agree a new academic calendar had failed, it was an achievement to enable the University to align on a preferred model. Throughout the project, our team’s way of working was commended as providing critical support to University leaders to drive this complex project forward. The Vice Chancellor called out the project specifically when he said that “This project is an example of how we need to work collaboratively to deliver change and embed a continuous improvement mindset”.
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