Summer School Procedures Manual Chapter 12: Marketing Your Summer Courses

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Summer School Procedures Manual Chapter 12: Marketing Your Summer Courses

12. Marketing Your Summer Courses

A. Making Summer School Successful

The success of Summer School is vital to each unit. As students seek other summer opportunities, courses face competition. In determining a course lineup, you should select courses that have high enrollments in the academic year and meet General Education requirements and/or major or minor requirements. You should also consider courses that will appeal for other reasons, such as courses that are often closed to non-majors in the academic year, that had waitlists, or that meet a specific Gen Ed requirement. Sections of the same course seated or online could compete for enrollment and affect whether the course is taught.

B. Promoting Your Courses

1. Once a course listing is developed, you should consider ways to promote your unit's offerings to students. Summer School will do broad advertising in campus media, primarily The Daily Tar Heel, and in publications that go to incoming students through summer orientation.
2. Summer School works with academic advisers in the College to ensure that they note the benefits of Summer School to students, especially incoming transfer students and students who are on probation. Summer School courses allow students to make up deficits or improve a GPA.
3. Summer School administrators are in the best position to promote the specific course content and faculty who will teach summer courses. Some suggestions:
   1. Post information about your Summer School classes on your unit's website.
   2. Use appropriate social media within your unit to showcase courses and to reach students (you can also follow @UNC Summer School on Twitter and Instagram).
   3. Prior to the March registration date, send information about Summer School classes to your majors. You can send via listservs through student organizations within your unit or on social media. Use whatever method you have in place to communicate with students. Remember to communicate to graduate students who might want to take a summer class.
   4. Ask faculty to produce flyers that can be posted in your building or displayed on a video board. Flyers could be reserved for new offerings or those that have some other appeal. Flyers could also be posted in PDF versions on the unit's website, or sent to Summer School to be linked to course descriptions.  Summer School may be able to assist with production of flyers.  
   5. Faculty members who blog or use social media can also share course information with specific audiences.
   6. Ask faculty who are teaching in summer tell students in their fall or spring classes about their upcoming summer courses. Faculty who are teaching in Maymester should especially point out the benefits of the shorter session to their students.
   7. Take advantage of any orientation sessions or other times large groups of your majors are together to promote your summer classes. Remind students of the need to plan carefully so they can graduate within eight (8) semesters and how summer classes can help them to complete double majors or minors.
   8. Prior to the end of the spring semester, send to your majors another reminder about summer classes, particularly if you have monitored enrollments and see that some classes are low. Faculty teaching those classes should be reminded to tell students that they are teaching in summer. In the past, just that reminder has doubled enrollment in some classes.
   9. Check for any wait lists attached to fall semester courses that are also taught in summer. Email the waitlist students about the availability of the course in summer. Or, if a course for spring has a waitlist, email students on the waitlist in early December if the course is scheduled to be taught in summer.
   10. If a course is cross-listed, be sure to send flyers or use social media to publicize the course(s) to that department's students.