CourseLeaf revolutionizes class scheduling process across campus

One of Central Washington University’s most successful software rollouts in recent years — perhaps ever — has taken place over the past 11 months, thanks to the behind-the-scenes work of the Academic Scheduling team.

The team, housed in the Office of the Registrar, introduced a new scheduling management system called CourseLeaf to the university community in January 2025, and the response from the staff in charge of scheduling classes and classrooms has been overwhelmingly positive.

“I’ve been on campus for 30 years, and this is one of the best software programs I’ve ever seen implemented at CWU — and I’ve seen quite a few,” said Chemistry Department administrator Lisa Stowe, who manages class schedules and room reservations for her colleagues.

“The Registrar’s Office did an amazing job selecting and implementing this software,” she added. “They involved end-users like me every step of the way, and they are constantly improving the functionality of the system to make it work better for all of us. I’ve been really impressed with how smoothly everything has gone.”

Music Department Office Assistant Anne Smethurst has had a similarly positive experience using CourseLeaf over the past year, praising the Academic Scheduling team of Assistant Registrar Joey Thornton, Program Coordinator Louise Smart, and student employee Sam Coyle (’25).

“This project was a big lift for them, but I feel like the rollout was a huge success,” Smethurst said. “They did their research and found something that would work well for every department on campus. They talked to a lot of people and did whatever they could to make sure everything went as smoothly as possible. We have all benefited from their hard work.”

In the fall of 2023, shortly after Thornton was promoted to his current role, the team identified a critical need to improve CWU’s class scheduling process. They worked with Registrar Arturo Torres to secure the funding for a software solution, and after the team selected CourseLeaf, they spent the next year planning the implementation.

By involving faculty and staff at all levels of the organization — including deans, department chairs, and the Provost’s Office — Academic Scheduling was able to work out many of the potential bugs before launching CourseLeaf in early winter quarter of 2025.

Just as Thornton and Smart had hoped, the new software solution has completely revolutionized how class scheduling and room reservations are managed across campus.

“People love CourseLeaf because it gives them an agility with their academic offerings that they’ve never had,” Thornton said. “The previous system we had was very cumbersome and it involved so many more steps and approvals. But now, all of our courses and available classrooms are visible in one place. There are countless advantages, but most of all, it makes people’s jobs easier — much easier.”

Outdated Systems

The “old way” involved sending multiple rounds of Excel spreadsheets to every department on campus, trying to make sense of comments from dozens of stakeholders and scrolling through long email threads to ensure everyone’s concerns were addressed.

Smart has been involved in that painstaking process since she started at CWU in 2016, and she often thought to herself, “there has to be a better way.”

“I would be working on it all day long for days on end, and there were times when the amount of work we had to do felt absolutely insane,” she said, noting that she learned about CourseLeaf back when she first came to CWU.

Every quarter, Smart and her colleagues would send out individual Excel spreadsheets to every department and then manually input their changes into the system. They then repeated the entire process with the “final” draft.

“After that round, we ran the room optimizer and then opened up the term to further scheduling revisions,” she said. “Those continued until the start of the term, involving copious amounts of email approvals and editing on our part. This was not only inefficient; it also really disrupted the room reservation process.”

After Smart and her former colleagues manually entered all of the Excel edits into PeopleSoft, the final schedules could be viewed by faculty, staff, and students.

“It would get pretty confusing,” she said. “People would schedule two classes for the same room or have time periods that would overlap, and there was no one to catch those discrepancies but our team. I honestly don’t know how we did it that way for so long.”

She was overjoyed when the funding to purchase the new software was approved in 2023.

“I attended a CourseLeaf demonstration in 2016 and immediately thought, ‘that’s it!’” Smart said. “It was a huge relief for everyone when we finally went ahead and purchased it. Our lives are so much easier now.”

Even before Excel spreadsheets were introduced into the class scheduling process, Stowe remembers the days when all of the departments on campus would use unwieldy green-bar printouts to input their changes.

“Everything had to be written by hand and then they would kick them out in batches to every department in quadruplicate,” she said. “Then the scheduling team would have to key it all in. Excel felt like a revolution at the time because you could add your comments in red or strike through incorrect data on the document. Now that we’ve been using CourseLeaf for a while, I don’t know how we ever managed with the old system.”

Solving A Big Puzzle

One of the behind-the-scenes heroes in the CourseLeaf rollout has been Sam Coyle, a recent CWU psychology graduate who figured out the inner workings of the software and managed to communicate its functionality to dozens of campus partners like Stowe and Smethurst.

She mastered the program so much that she wrote a detailed instruction manual that CourseLeaf representatives have adopted as a training manual for other clients.

“I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how CourseLeaf works, and I kept a lot of notes as I went along that eventually turned into a guide for other people to use,” said Coyle, who moved away after graduation but continues to work with the team remotely. “I knew I was going to have to teach other people how to use it, so creating a detailed manual just made sense.”

Coyle’s expertise proved to be instrumental in the testing, training, and implementation phases that preceded the software rollout. She also served as a liaison with the software company and with stakeholders across campus, becoming the go-to resource for all things CourseLeaf.

“Sam really went out of her way to make things easier for the end-users,” Smethurst said. “She hosted trainings and was always available to answer any questions we had.”

Coyle, the 2025 Student Employee of the Year winner for “Most Proud,” said she enjoys solving complex problems and finding new efficiencies. When she was asked by Thornton to take a lead role on the CourseLeaf rollout, she welcomed the challenge.

“It felt like doing a puzzle,” Coyle said. “If you work on it long enough, you figure out what works. When someone would come to us with an issue, I would go in and find a different way so that they wouldn’t run into those same problems. And, eventually, we made it so everything worked the way it was supposed to. It felt really good when we finally got to that point.”

There are even more efficiencies that can eventually be added to CourseLeaf, and the team has been looking for new ways to improve the system this fall. But, heading into the current academic year, Coyle and her colleagues felt confident that they were in a good place.

“The feedback we have received from across campus has been amazing ,” she said. “We’re going to keep looking for ways to make the system easier to use, but we are happy with the progress we have made.”

Thornton concurred, saying, “We’ve been able to achieve a pie-in-the-sky goal that the university has had for many years, and not only did we find a solution to the problem; we did a great job of testing it and implementing it. I don’t want to be overly presumptuous, but we haven’t heard any complaints yet.”

“We’ve heard that this has been one of the best software rollouts this university has ever seen,” Smart added. “It feels good to know we’ve been able to make so many people’s jobs easier.”

Universal Benefits

One of the most significant advantages to using CourseLeaf is that it shows potential conflicts with class times or classrooms in real time. For example, if a user tries to schedule a required class at the same time as another required class in a specific major, the system doesn’t allow them to proceed.

“The software kind of goes on autopilot, and it eliminates any possibility for human error, which we didn’t have before,” Thornton said. 

CourseLeaf also gives departments the option of scheduling out their classes for an entire year — something that wasn’t possible with the old system. This capability has proven to be a game-changer for departments across campus and, most of all, their students.

“Our students tell us all the time how much they love being able to schedule their classes so far in advance,” Smethurst said. “It used to be that we couldn’t even build our spring schedule until early winter quarter, but now, everything is built out at the start of the school year. Rooms are assigned, times are assigned, and it’s all officially entered into the system. That takes a lot of pressure off of our faculty and advisors, but especially our students because now they can plan ahead much better than before.”

Stowe pointed to another huge advantage CourseLeaf offers: direct connectivity with 25Live, the room-scheduling platform paired with PeopleSoft (MyCWU) that every CWU department uses.

When a staff member enters a room or time change into CourseLeaf, the update appears automatically in 25Live, eliminating the risk of double-booking rooms or other potential scheduling conflicts.

“Once our schedules are drafted, they go directly into MyCWU, which didn’t happen before,” Stowe said. “CourseLeaf offers so much flexibility and functionality, and it just can’t be overstated how much this change has benefited our students and faculty.”

The Academic Scheduling team reports that support staff across campus can’t say enough good things about this valuable new tool bestowed upon them.

Thornton, Smart, and Coyle know they have accomplished a monumental feat with the CourseLeaf rollout, but they may not be aware how much their work has positively impacted their colleagues across the university.

“I don’t know if they realize what a difference they’ve made in our jobs and in our lives, but Joey, Louise, and Sam are unsung heroes,” Stowe said. “Their work often flies under the radar, but they have made such a huge difference. We can’t thank them enough.”