May 15, 2002
TO:
Susan J. Foster
Information Technologies
FROM:
James K. Broomall
Professional and Continuing Studies
SUBJECT:
Planning for 2002-2003
Thank you for the opportunity to share our plans for the future. We have had excellent support
from your staff and look forward to continued good relationships.
Local Information Management
Our noncredit registration system, which was built by your staff several years ago, needs
enhancements to allow us to register students, take credit cards and update the database over the
web. We also hope to add the financial component to the database which will allow us to
compare expenses against the revenue for courses. Jane Wise has been very helpful in the early
stages of the project. As we progress, we will need support from IT and continued backup
services.
We also are developing a new database for our UD Online program. The current database uses
old technology. MIS currently provides backup and support for our databases and servers, and
we look forward to continuing that relationship.
It would be helpful to have a report that shows UD Online students registered, but not paid, at
specific time periods. A major difference between those courses and regular courses is that
students are told they will be dropped from the course if payment is not on their account by a
certain date. Non-distance students do not get dropped by these specified dates. A report would
help to identify these students so we can manually “drop” them.
The UD Online Annex offices will be moving this summer; we will be looking to MIS for advice
on reconnecting to UD from another (probable) off-campus location. MIS support connecting
our new site to the University ethernet will be needed.
We are currently working with MIS (Rajarao Surampudy) to reduce the number of section
numbers for UD Online courses. Successful completion of this project will greatly reduce the
complexity of registering students for UD Online courses. Raja is an important resource for us,
and we look forward to working with him on this project and others. PeopleSoft data
inaccessibility is a challenge. PeopleSoft-HR apparently has been effective with very obscure
mechanisms for securing data to those authorized for it. But it also appears to make the system
difficult to use for management information on groups of employees for whom we are authorized
access. Its web screens will allow HR liaisons, supervisors, and form authorizers to examine
only one transaction or employee at a time. If validation or planning require collective
information on 50 or 500 such transactions or employees, then that many pages must be viewed
and/or printed and/or rekeyed to PC-programs before they can be analyzed in any groupwise
fashion.
Query access of some kind is needed to make this database useful for management decisions,
rather than just as an input and storage device. Access to groupwise output should be secured to
the same employees and transactions as the single pages. The data source could be either the live
PeopleSoft data or a static reflection like the FAMIS data warehouse. Either would restore
important functionality that has been lost since the removal of download access we once had
with the previous system (eg. APOPRSNL-IS, APOJOB-IS, etc).
Administrative PC Refreshment Program
In December 2000 we identified nine pcs to be replaced. The information was forwarded to the
appropriate person on December 22 of that year. No response was made to our request. Because
of the importance of our needs, we have replaced six of these with our resources. We would
appreciate information on the status of the program, and if we can request funds to upgrade other
pcs in our Division.
Services you provide: Student Service - SIS+ Web Interfaces
Web tools built for online registration can and should be reused to eliminate certain obstacles
that need not currently be blocking some Continuing Education students, visiting students,
incoming freshmen, previously-accepted admission applicants, and returning graduates from
registering for classes. Those groups have just enough of a student record in SIS+ to prevent
their creating a new student record via the "Quick-Bio" application, but not a complete enough
one to allow registration until the student contacts UD staff for minor updates to make their
record active. There is no judgement needed on the part of those staff members to create a "CE
matriculation" for those students--just keystrokes. They are all welcome to participate at UD as a
Continuing Education classified student. Since the student's request is the only basis for
enabling their registration capability, that student request should be accepted via the web as a
prelude to the existing web registration process.
If a student has no "matriculation" for the term in which (s)he is interested, the existing modules
for "Address Verification" and "Statement of Residency" should be asserted to them as they
begin to register. Their responses should be interfaced to a program that emulates the "Quick
Admit" SIS+ screens that live staff now use to create a current CE matriculation. If they have
never set their UD PIN, then that existing module should also be presented automatically.
This would eliminate frustration on the part of many students who want to register (especially for
Summer, Winter, and Continuing Education administered courses) and cannot even know from
the current system why they are prevented from doing so. They get vague error messages that
their student record cannot be created, or that they are ineligible to register and should contact
the Registrar or Student Services Building to find out why. These students are important sources
of additional tuition revenue to the University, and enable the University to serve the broader
community. We have the tools necessary to make their participation easy--we just need to
assemble them so as to prevent potential students from being turned away, frustrated, and
possibly lost for registration.
Technologies “Challenge”
As mentioned here earlier, we want to be able to allow students to register and pay for noncredit
courses via the web. MIS support with web credit is key to our success with this goal.
JKB/jwc
cc:
Bobby Gempesaw
Academic and International Programs