Online registration on target for spring ’03
OASIS to line up next fall’s classes
By Randy Klodz
Staff Writer

The software, OASIS, was designed to give students a hassle-free registration process, one that students and faculty have asked for many times. OASIS, which stands for Online Administrative Student Information Systems, received its name last year through a student voting process.

Bernadette McMahon, chief information officer for Columbia, said the current plan is to have online registration take place much as it normally would in spring 2003, but for there to be a change in some procedures.

The plan involves a pre-registration consultation with a faculty member in the student’s department of study, followed by a separately assigned registration time frame. Students will then complete the registration process in a new computer lab on Columbia’s campus. Officials aim to create a lab with 100 new computers. The goal, according to McMahon, is for the registration lab to eventually become an open student computing lab during the times when registration is not being conducted.

Although the initial run of online registration may seem tedious due to the fact that it will still occur on campus, McMahon said that was a necessary precaution.

“Just in case the students run into problems, we want to make sure [they] don’t get frustrated this time through,” McMahon said. “We want to do this in a controlled environment so the students won’t have problems with registration.” McMahon also said that problems with transfer credits might cause the most confusion. “We can’t just release it and say, ‘OK students, just go and register,’” McMahon said.

In previous semesters, students have been required to present a course grid with several class combinations to a faculty adviser in their major’s department at a designated time. The faculty adviser would then simply check that course prerequisites had been met and manually enter course number codes for each student’s courses.

With this new process, McMahon and her team hope to give students what she calls a “quality session with an adviser,” where “the faculty can concentrate on advising [students] as opposed to being a data-entry clerk.”

With OASIS, purchased by Columbia from Jenzabar last December, McMahon is confident that students and faculty will not encounter the same problems that occurred with Mascot, the school’s previous software.

Mascot was only in use for a short time in the fall of 2001. The program offered students access to a student directory, message boards and other student-oriented activities. As previously reported in the Chronicle, the Mascot program cost Columbia $30,000, but the company that owned and developed the software went bankrupt after only a few weeks of use by students.

McMahon said OASIS differs from Mascot because the school owns the software and currently houses it on Columbia’s servers. With Mascot, the school didn’t own the software and did not have control of the server the program was stored on. When the company went under, so did all of its services.

Although Mascot no longer exists, it did offer students a range of services they could access from their home computer. Columbia officials are exploring plans that would allow OASIS to offer students more than online registration. Possible ventures include expanding the range of services the software would provide to online access to registration schedules, financial aid reports and tuition bills.

McMahon said she hopes that being able to track financial aid reports will allow students to monitor the processing of paperwork over the summer periods.

The plan is to have all aspects of OASIS up and running by April 2003 and teams are entering previous student data.

“It’s a huge goal for 10,000 students and converting all the records to a new system, it’s a challenge but everybody’s excited about it,” McMahon said.

In addition to the services of OASIS, another feature of the Jenzabar software will allow students to view course information online. Faculty will begin training in January on the portion of the program that will enable them to place class syllabi and handouts online for students’ use. The staff of the Center for Instructional Technology will instruct the faculty on the software.