Online registration delayed another semester
Registrar says the college is a semester behind in implimenting online registration due to slow data transfers
Aaron Hummel
Issue date: 3/27/08 Section: News
Students may have to endure paper-based preregistration for the last time this week, Registrar Douglas McArthur said March 13. According to his tentative schedule, students will register in the traditional manner next semester, but October preregistration for spring 2009 will occur online, he said.
"For the registration that takes place at the beginning of the '09 semester things will be radically different," he said. "I don't know what shape they'll take yet, but our goal is that there won't be a lot of students standing in line."
This schedule delayed from an earlier goal of offering online registration for fall 2008 because transferring course offerings and academic histories to the school's new database took much longer than expected, McArthur said.
"We're about a semester behind where we wanted to be, but I'm not discouraged," he said. "Obviously we'd like to get this done because the students are asking for it [and] faculty are asking for more online capabilities. It makes no sense not to use the tools that are available, but we're trying to do it prudently."
A pilot test of online registration was scheduled for last fall, but it has been pushed back to fall 2008 because of the delay.
Junior Ian Beuckelaere said he had to use a class schedule he found in Delp to make his preregistration schedule Wednesday, because he couldn't find a schedule online.
"I think it's unnecessarily complex and unnecessarily time consuming," he said. "The community college that I went to had online registration [and] online bill paying - it was quick."
The school contracted with Datatel in 2004 to begin updating with the company's Colleague software, a modular software package that supports most of the college's recordkeeping needs, said Director of Student Financial Aid Rich Moeggenberg. Since then, the school has been working to transfer the information into the new database, and the process has just arrived at the point where online registration is a realistic possibility in the near future, he said.
"For the registration that takes place at the beginning of the '09 semester things will be radically different," he said. "I don't know what shape they'll take yet, but our goal is that there won't be a lot of students standing in line."
This schedule delayed from an earlier goal of offering online registration for fall 2008 because transferring course offerings and academic histories to the school's new database took much longer than expected, McArthur said.
"We're about a semester behind where we wanted to be, but I'm not discouraged," he said. "Obviously we'd like to get this done because the students are asking for it [and] faculty are asking for more online capabilities. It makes no sense not to use the tools that are available, but we're trying to do it prudently."
A pilot test of online registration was scheduled for last fall, but it has been pushed back to fall 2008 because of the delay.
Junior Ian Beuckelaere said he had to use a class schedule he found in Delp to make his preregistration schedule Wednesday, because he couldn't find a schedule online.
"I think it's unnecessarily complex and unnecessarily time consuming," he said. "The community college that I went to had online registration [and] online bill paying - it was quick."
The school contracted with Datatel in 2004 to begin updating with the company's Colleague software, a modular software package that supports most of the college's recordkeeping needs, said Director of Student Financial Aid Rich Moeggenberg. Since then, the school has been working to transfer the information into the new database, and the process has just arrived at the point where online registration is a realistic possibility in the near future, he said.
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