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Academic
Computing Steering Committee
(AcCSC) Minutes of Meetings: Present: Bauman, Cossey, Davis, Keller, Klein, Lesh, Smith; Guests: P. Adey, J. Peck, K. Rosenthal, Dave R. Review of last meeting's minutes Discussion of online data collection and registration. This meeting was devoted to a discussion to plans and possibilities for using the web to help students register for courses. 1. Incoming First-years. T. Smith and the web office are working with the Registrar's Office and the Dean of Undergraduate Education to collect necessary data from incoming first-year students in a series of web-based forms. The information to be collected includes:
In addition to these forms, two departments, Chemistry and Mathematics, plan to have incoming students take placement exams on the web. Chemistry will use Blackboard, and Mathematics will use an exam developed within the Department. ITS will ensure that every incoming first-year student has a blackboard account by mid-summer. T. Smith and K. Rosenthal see this project as moving along quite well. 2. Card course sign-up. At a previous meeting with D. Cossey, Dave R., P. Adey, and S. Maleki (AAC Chair) the possibility of using an online system to give students a uniform way to request cards was discussed. At our meeting we discussed this issue again, noting that Math and Econ already use home-grown systems. ITS suggested that it may be possible to do something like this within Colleague 17, but that since the conversion to this system will not be complete until late Spring, it is too early to predict what is feasible. ITS further suggested that it would not want to create a home-grown system to collect card information. A college-wide and ITS administered system would carry additional burdens of security and user verification that individual departments do not seem to worry about. Several possible directions were discussed.
3. Online registration. Colleague 17 also brings with it, for the first time, the technical capability for students to actually do online registration. Exactly what issues that will raise on the technical and support side will not be known until Colleague 17 is fully up and tested. More to the point, the College will have to decide politically and pedagogically what responsibilities it wants to place on students and faculty advisors with regard to registering for classes. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to program into Colleague every nuance of the college catalog regarding major, minor, gen ed requirements, and the prerequisite structure of every course. Absent this information, students and their advisors may make incorrect and incompatible course selections. This is where the College must decide how much accuracy is sufficient, based on what the system can do, what we can afford, and how much responsibility we are willing to shift to students and advisors. After Colleague 17 is up, we might recommend to AAC that an ad hoc committee of faculty, students, ITS staff, and Registrar staff be set up to examine these issues and make recommendations.
Next meeting: March Fourth, 2003, 1:30 PM, ITS conference room |
© 2003 Union College, Schenectady, New York |
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