As registration for next Fall’s courses begins today, many will be taking the new Student Information System (SIS) seriously for the first time. What they will find is a mix of great new features along with a series of less than great frustrations. Currently, most are not as happy as they could or should be about replacing the Integrated Student Information System (ISIS) with the SIS. After pouring millions of dollars into this new site and selling the University’s soul to Oracle, the site has left students and faculty strikingly ambivalent.
The most visible defect with the site is its incompatibility with Safari. The fact that many Mac users, an increasing proportion of the University body, cannot access the site using their standard browser is ridiculous. This problem should have been revealed and resolved during the testing before students gained access. According to Carole Horwitz, director of communications for the Student System Project, their team is “still researching,” the problem. Furthermore, I use Firefox on my Mac and still had trouble getting onto the site. I would frequently get a sign in error that said to contact the system administrator if the problem persisted. (I hope this article counts.)
I even went to a student Information Technology and Communication representative in a library and told her I was having trouble accessing the SIS even using Firefox. All she told me was, “SIS isn’t working for any Macs — sorry, try using one of the library computers.”
Needless to say, I wasn’t giving up that easily. After trying to change my pop-up blocker preferences to allow for the site, the problem persisted. I had to dig through the help site to find that I had to allow “admin.virginia.edu” not “sisuva.admin.virginia.edu” (the actual site’s URL) to gain access. While my problem is solved, for now, I’m sure many other Mac users are still fumbling around trying to figure out what they are doing wrong.
The feature I was most excited about when SIS first arrived was the planning tool under the Student Center. This tool was supposed to allow students to layout the courses that they would like to take for every single semester they will be at the University. Unfortunately, the system is not very helpful, ironically, because of poor planning. Students can only add courses by browsing the complete course catalogue that does not contain information for which semesters the courses are offered. How are students supposed to plan by semester if that information isn’t given in the catalogue?
The only way around this problem is to use the class search feature, search by semester, keep your own list of classes offered in each semester, then go back
into the planning tool, browse through the complete course catalogue, and finally add each course to its respective semester in the planning tool.
The planning tool was supposed to be designed so that students wouldn’t have to generate and maintain their own record of what they would be taking each semester. Unfortunately, because of the divorce between the option to search by semester and plan by semester, students are still forced to generate a list on their own before going back into the planning tool. While the final set of courses offered is often not finalized until the beginning of a semester, adding information regarding when courses are expected to be offered along with an option to search by semester would make the planning tool much more effective.
Other features are not so much problems as annoyances. For example, every time I search for classes in a given department, I am stopped and warned that my search will return over 50 classes. I know perfectly well that my search will return over 50 classes! Of course I want to continue! Please stop wasting my time to tell me this!
Also, minor ergonomic features seem unintuitive. For example, advisors clicking on an advisee’s name will be met by a pop-up for an email addressed to that student, not the page with the student’s academic information.
On the other hand, there are definitely a couple of changes SIS got right. The new system that only requires the advisor to lift a student’s hold on registration removes a step in the advising process, making the process simpler.
By far, the best feature is the enrollment request tool, whereby students can generate a list of classes they would like to enroll in the following semester before gaining enrollment access. This tool automatically attempts to enroll the student in her set of selected classes as soon as her registration access opens. This allows students to plan ahead and have the peace of mind that they attempted to enroll in a class as soon as possible.
In addition, if the class search option is connected with the planning tool so that students can actually plan by semester and by requirements, this feature could help students plan to make the most of their time at the University.
Furthermore, the Student Systems Project should be commended for its response to faculty and student feedback. For example, a complaint lodged against the original site was that the class search feature required students to know the departmental abbreviations before searching for classes. When faced with this complaint, the office immediately responded by adding the departmental search option to the site.
“We heard their call and were able to fix it,” Horwitz said.
This system has the potential to ease the stress of formal interaction with University bureaucracy all the way from academic advising down to the registrar’s office. To meet that potential, changes need to be made.
Matt Dickey’s column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at m.dickey@cavalierdaily.com.
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