As an administrator or program director, you may be tempted to launch a new program as soon as need, idea, and opportunity converge. After all, the sooner a program opens its doors, the sooner students become proud alumni. However, the more planning that is done at the outset of program implementation, the more holistic and coherent the program will be, and thus, the more successful.
Daniel Seymour’s Developing Academic Programs: The Climate for Innovation report continues to be a perennial resource. Although it was published in 1988, it articulates a problem that may still feel familiar. As institutions change and grow, academic programs often arise not through intentional planning but seemingly innately: “It has been a product of faculty interests and a by-product of a growth environment. It has simply occurred” (Seymour, 1988, p. 12).
Despite its possibilities and its importance, this process remains ill-defined and, more importantly, infrequently explained. Seymour (1988) also observed that “Most of our time and effort in developing new programs are devoted to finding out whether the proposal for a program is viable. In the future, however, we need to begin to shift our emphasis to a more proactive consideration—not merely whether a proposed program is viable but how a new program will become successful” (p. 8).
This piece will walk you through the key phases of program implementation with a focus on finding that “how.” Anchoring your planning in these phases and addressing the questions each phase presents helps to ensure that every subsequent decision aligns with institutional goals, accreditation standards, and student success. We will emphasize some of the more critical and often overlooked components of program development that will set the stage for success. It concludes with a few guiding questions, one for each key stage of program implementation, for you to take with you as you set out.
Considering the “Why”
Determining whether launching a new program is the right choice requires careful analysis of institutional context, student demand, and long-term viability. Factors such as alignment with the institution’s mission, existing infrastructure, and the needs of prospective students should be central to this assessment. Hanover Research’s 2024 Academic Program Development handbook suggests evaluating four factors when assessing whether a proposed program might be successful: student demand, labor market trends, market saturation for the program, and implementation requirements. Consider how you might evaluate these factors to determine whether the program should be created and, if so, what strategies and partnerships might be particularly well suited to your institution.
It’s also important to recognize that the type of program alone is often less indicative of success than the environment in which it is launched. For example, a recent analysis found that program outcomes are shaped more by the characteristics and readiness of the institution than by the specific field of study itself (Adame, 2023). This underscores the importance of evaluating not only the potential market and curriculum but also the unique strengths and constraints of the institution before proceeding with implementation. In short, it’s key to consider why this program, at this institution, at this particular time, will be successful before proceeding.
Once you’ve established your answers to these questions, complete one final project: attempt to evaluate the potential future of the program. Consider this from multiple angles:
- Will there likely be enough enrollment to keep the program going year after year, or will you quickly reach saturation and run out of potential students?
- Will you need to scale the program at some point to accommodate larger student populations? If so, are there strategies you can implement in the planning process that will lend themselves to increased efficiency in a larger program?
- Will future, potentially larger cohorts have similar needs to your initial group, or will there be gaps to fill or adjustments to make?
This will help you make future-focused decisions as you move into the second and third phases of implementation.
Cultivating Stakeholders
Before you begin, it’s critical to consider who needs to be a part of the conversation. Start with the non-negotiables: any curriculum review boards, online learning offices, institutional research and accreditation offices, legal counsel, or external licensing or certification bodies whose approvals and oversight are prerequisites for launch. Any existing department chairs, provosts, vice provosts, faculty, and administrators are equally critical, as they can be a new program’s strongest champions or its most cutting detractors. Make sure you have a plan for connecting and integrating them into the program in large or small ways.
Once those “must-have” voices are on your roadmap, widen the circle beyond the obvious partners to include potentially less visible but equally critical stakeholders: accessibility specialists, facilities managers, financial aid and IT teams, marketing and enrollment services, and other administrative units whose work intersects with student experience. Finally, consider which regional industry or workforce-development councils you can consult, or whether you should consider an industry advisory board of your own. Their insights can keep your program aligned with evolving market demands and employer expectations. Cultivating these kinds of stakeholders in these areas not only helps the program meet requirements but also increases efficiency, as you’ll be bringing in experts rather than researching from scratch.
As you map the points of interaction each stakeholder will have, ask yourself who else could help you anticipate or clear hurdles, like institutional data analysts, student-success coaches, or library specialists. However, you’ll need to evaluate critically and dispassionately what role each of these stakeholders will truly be able to play in your program. For instance, if you are associated with a large campus, you likely have robust career and student services or a large instructional design and faculty development center. However, upon review, you may find that the in-house support does not have the capacity to take on the additional responsibilities your program requires or that they don’t offer the type of support your program would benefit from. If your institution’s instructional design teams typically do individual course consultations and you need a program built from the ground up, for example, it’s beneficial to discover this at this stage of the process so that you can plan around it. Taking stock of your current resources and comparing them with what the new program will demand allows you to budget for additional hires, forge external partnerships, or invest in upskilling your team.
Designing for Efficiency and Effectiveness
Some design decisions you make at the beginning of a program will define the course of the program for years to come, locking you into specific strategies downstream. Course modality, for instance—whether a program is fully online, hybrid, or on campus—sets boundaries that will shape almost every subsequent decision. This choice influences technology adoption, faculty hiring and training, student support structures, and the kinds of assessments that are practical to implement. You may have a great deal of control over each of these decisions, or you may already have them predetermined by your institution or governing bodies; regardless, this is a useful point in the process to consider their impacts.
Two particularly influential items to intentionally consider during early-stage program planning are curriculum and scheduling. Two key strategies that support efficient operations in these areas—regardless of the discipline at issue or the calendar used—are standardization and wheeling.
Standardization
Standardization focuses on creating common templates, processes, and expectations for course creation, revision, and delivery. During program development, stakeholders work together to define or affirm standards for course design, instructional materials, and communications. This includes decisions around syllabi structure, grading schemes, assignment formats, and the integration of institutional or program-specific policies such as academic integrity or accessibility requirements.
Why standardize? This may seem at the outset like added work—if we don’t standardize, after all, we save the time that standardization takes. However, consistency has its own rewards. Standardized syllabi, assignment formats, and grading rubrics ensure that students have a consistent learning experience across courses and instructors. Even consistency with small items, such as the options on a menu in a learning management system, can provide big dividends for students, as a familiar format increases accessibility and reduces cognitive load.
It also allows for exponentially more efficiency as the program scales. For faculty and staff, standardization reduces repetitive work and lowers the likelihood of errors or inconsistencies. It facilitates easier onboarding of new instructors and supports program assessment and accreditation processes by providing clear, uniform documentation. By investing in this upfront standardization, programs reduce redundancy, lower the likelihood of errors, and create a cohesive learning experience across all courses and instructors.
In addition to common templatable elements like document formats and syllabi sections, there may also be other elements of consistency that can unify a program in terms of course approach and structure. Considering common pain points or biggest concerns about the program’s effectiveness can help to identify which common features might be most helpful. For example, if your program includes the need for a great deal of vocabulary memorization, certain standardization choices can make this process easier for students. You might consider creating a standard template format for terms to be presented in each course, or you might opt to require each course to contribute to a shared glossary of program vocabulary available to all students. Or, if you are pitching a program with online courses and would like its students to be eligible for financial aid, you are likely concerned about meeting requirements for regular and substantive interaction while maintaining the flexibility that motivates students to choose an online program (Piña & Martindale, 2023). Establishing specific synchronous session requirements or asynchronous interaction standards can support that goal.
Course Scheduling
Optimizing course scheduling, sometimes called “program wheeling” or designing a “course carousel,” refers to the strategic scheduling of courses. These strategies generally allow for multiple cohorts to take required classes together, typically at the beginning or end of their program. By concentrating course offerings at these key points, institutions can maximize enrollment in each section, schedule faculty instructional time more efficiently, and avoid duplicative sessions. For example, if all students across several cohorts are required to take a foundational methods course, offering it within a specifically chosen overlapping term rather than upon initial enrollment allows multiple cohorts to enroll together. Of course, not all courses or programs lend themselves to total efficiency. Some courses require particular prerequisites; others need to be taken at a particular point in a student's journey through the program, such as a first-semester seminar or a capstone project.
While scheduling may seem like a secondary concern during early program design, thoughtful planning in this area can yield significant cost savings and operational benefits. Common bottlenecks such as prerequisite chains, limited faculty availability, and high-demand courses can create challenges even in fully online or asynchronous programs. Identifying potential scheduling bottlenecks early in the planning process and designing course rotations accordingly can prevent delays in student progress and improve student completion rates. Addressing these logistical considerations up front helps minimize barriers for students and creates a more resilient, adaptable academic calendar (Hanover Research, 2018).
When leveraged together, adroit wheeling and standardization create a foundation for efficient program delivery. Wheeling optimizes when and how courses are taught, while standardization ensures that what is taught—and how it is delivered—remains consistent and high quality across the board. Institutions may then find efficiency gains by examining whether existing courses can, with minor revisions, be standardized into the program structure and find a home on the program wheel.
Staffing the Program
At its heart, building and sustaining a program involves coordinating people, policies, and resources to ensure a high-quality learning environment. As such, choosing the correct people to staff the program as subject matter experts, designers, facilitators, decision makers, and administrators is crucial; they will not only be the faces of the program for most students but also help to implement and maintain the structures and relationships you’ve established during the previous phases of implementation.
Although staffing decisions may seem like the first step, it’s often more effective to define roles and responsibilities before you determine who to hire, appoint, or pull into the program. A clear, documented framework—such as a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix—ensures new team members arrive with a precise understanding of their contributions and communication pathways. Early on, list the core activities your program requires (e.g., course design, content updates, technical support, issue escalation) and map them against your key roles (subject-matter expert, instructional designer, facilitator, administrator). Assign each combination one of the RACI labels. This approach makes it explicit who “owns” each task, who needs to be looped in for input, and who should simply stay informed.
This process offers multiple rewards. By clarifying authority and escalation paths up front, you’ll streamline communication, reduce confusion when questions arise during development and delivery, and build a much stronger foundation for your program. Additionally, it may lead you to realize that your list of roles is incomplete—that there are responsibilities that don’t naturally align with any existing role, or that the existing roles are responsible or accountable for too much on top of their existing responsibilities.
Once you have a sense of what you need from your staff, move to what roles you will need to fill. Even if current faculty can handle the workload of the program, you may want to consider other types of program support you may need. Most obviously, you may need to hire subject matter experts to develop particular subject areas or instructors to cover particular terms or topics. If content will be reused term over term, plan for who will revise content when needed and maintain courses over time. Programs that are part of larger institutions or departments often benefit from a program head: someone to oversee the success and health of the program. Depending on how their role is structured, they might oversee wheeling and course scheduling, hiring and onboarding of program faculty, creation and duplication of course spaces, approvals for updating or sunsetting existing courses, or connection points to local industry.
Influenced by your consideration of responsibilities, iron out specific guidelines and contract terms before making new hires. Paradoxically, this is sometimes easier with an entirely new role and is more likely to be overlooked for more standard roles. For example, for development roles, it is wise to ponder at the outset how much reuse of content is possible, and what approach to intellectual property and content reuse the program will take. For some programs, course content created while a faculty member is under contract can be used by the program in perpetuity. For others, rights are retained by the faculty member. Other considerations may apply if the faculty brings content they developed independently or at another institution to develop a course in your program (Dutton, 2025). Explore what practices are customary in your discipline and what laws or institutional policies apply to your program, and establish such considerations clearly in faculty and staff contracts to avoid difficulties down the road.
Likewise, for facilitation roles, you’ll want to establish clear expectations for faculty regarding grading, use of rubrics, and feedback practices. This doesn’t mean you need to control every aspect of instructor-student interaction or mandate strict adherence to a single facilitation approach. Providing faculty with templates, expected timelines for communication and grading, access to institutional support services, and guidance on the use of technology—including learning management systems and multimedia tools—lays the groundwork for effective instruction and provides another opportunity to increase consistency in student experience. You may find some useful starting points by reviewing relevant resources for new instructors.
Finally, don’t overlook the need for ongoing support. Faculty development yields a range of benefits to a program, from improved student achievement (Gore et al., 2021) to institutional equity (Castillo-Montoya et al., 2023) to innovation in teaching excellence (Steinert et al., 2024). From your work in earlier phases, you may have some ideas about where your faculty, staff, and administrators can receive professional development, technological help, and pedagogical support. Or, you may have found that the options available to you will not fit the needs of the program, and you’ll need to look further afield. Now, consider how you will onboard new members of your team and how you will keep them up to date with the information they need to know, whether it’s programmatic or institutional updates, pedagogical or digital best practices, or emerging issues in the field. Ongoing review of your standards and planning for future innovation helps to ensure that courses remain aligned with both institutional goals and evolving best practices, supporting continuous improvement throughout the life of the program.
Guiding Questions for Implementation
There’s a lot to consider when implementing a program. The following list presents the most important questions for you and your stakeholders to consider at each phase of implementation.
- Why us, starting this program, right now, where we are?
- What people or entities need to be involved or would be beneficial to the program’s success?
- What structural elements should we implement to make the program more efficient and effective?
- What roles do we need in order to make this program successful, and what guidelines do we need to provide the people in these roles to perform them effectively?
References
Adame, J. (2023, March 20). Study field not key to new academic program success. Inside Higher Ed.
Castillo-Montoya, M., Bolitzer, L. A., & Sotto-Santiago, S. (2023). Reimagining faculty development: Activating faculty learning for diversity, equity, and inclusion. In L. W. Perna (Ed.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research: Volume 38 (pp. 415–481). Springer.
Dutton, C. (2025, June 26). He wrote a course syllabus. Is it still his? The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Gore, J. M., Miller, A., Fray, L., Harris, J., & Prieto, E. (2021). Improving student achievement through professional development: Results from a randomised controlled trial of Quality Teaching Rounds. Teaching and Teacher Education, 101, Article 103297.
Hanover Research. (2018). Best practices in course scheduling.
Hanover Research. (2024). Academic program development handbook.
Piña, A. A., & Martindale, T. (2023). Regular and substantive interaction in online courses: Why it matters for administrators. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 26(2).
Seymour, D. (1988). Developing academic programs: The climate for innovation. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 3. Association for the Study of Higher Education.
Steinert, Y., O’Sullivan, P. S., & Irby, D. M. (2024). The role of faculty development in advancing change at the organizational level. Academic Medicine, 99(7), 716–723.