<p>2 weeks later I find that I /thought/ I had confirmed my enrollment in a course, but no! Now Im in waitlist position #111. Grrr, its a really critical course for my sequence and now I feel like killing someone .who in their right mind ever designed this? Did they pay millions of dollars to set up a system to intentionally torture students? Was there something wrong with the old ISIS system where enrollment was NOT laggy and took a minimal amount of clicks?</p>
<p>Have you spoken to the professor or an academic dean? I imagine they are better equipped to handle this one. :)</p>
<p>If you have suggestions for improving the SIS, email the Student System Project. They have tried to make themselves known to students through email and their website, but I don’t hear about students contacting them very often.</p>
<p>You know what the weirdest thing is, I heard JMU uses the same system without our problems. I just checked and they definitely use it too. Maybe UVA should get in touch with them??</p>
<p>I was part of the Student System Project (I helped with the admission part of it…UREG had their own people involved in the student records part) and part of the project included surveying other institutions about their implementation of the product. Back in 2005-2006, there were site visits to many schools, phone calls, and consultants used to frame the way the system would be used here.</p>
<p>To be honest, UVa’s implementation was the best I’ve seen and there were consultants and people at PeopleSoft/Oracle who said the same…that no other school put in the time and research that UVa put in to get the SIS off the ground.</p>
<p>There are certain schools out there that have tried to move to the products we have here and failed. They didn’t have the man power or prep work needed and had to abandon the projects. </p>
<p>Even with extensive preparation and consultation, sometimes things don’t work in the live, production environment as they did in the test environments. It helps to have input. To make systems better, the users have to provide feedback. Those of you in engineering have probably talked about this…you could have the most elegant and efficient design for a widget, but if the user doesn’t find it easy and helpful, your widget isn’t going anywhere. If SSP doesn’t hear from students about how the system works for them, they will assume that all is well. Go to their website and use the contact link to email them about things you’re experiencing.</p>
<p>The product, by the way, is called PeopleSoft Campus Solutions and there oodles of schools that use it. SSP has been in touch with dozens of them over the years. There’s an organization called HEUG that is comprised of schools that use the Oracle/PeopleSoft product and that organization provides forums for schools to share best practices and ask for help.</p>
<p>From what I’ve heard through those involved with the migration, the biggest problem we’ve run into is trying to fit our former services and features into a design that is fairly structured. In other words we ask for a certain aspect to be incorporated and we’re given workarounds for ways this can be accomplished given the system’s capabilities as is. This is clearly not the way it should be and I know professors involved in the project are frustrated with this.</p>
<p>Utilizing this system to search for classes is painfully difficult and frankly should’ve failed any sort of usability test. I think that the university got too caught up in the sort of back end capabilities and streamlining aspects of the system that they forgot to consider the most important aspect, end user usability. 75% of the time we spend on the SIS is browsing through classes and building our schedule. The amount of time required to do that on the SIS vs ISIS/COD has tripled.</p>
<p>No amount of “suggestion” will force the change needed, a complete front-end overhaul of the course-registration process.</p>
<ol>
<li>It makes me worried when this is the best implementation of this software. It’s not just students. My advisor says she hasn’t met a professor who likes it, especially that one who made his own COD.</li>
<li>I just got (today) links to surveys about @UVA and a 4th year survey, in addition to the many surveys I get from housing, reslife, and even student health. Why isn’t this group doing that kind of thing? Maybe they just don’t care about our feedback as much as the groups running @UVA, student health, reslife, etc. I think a survey sent out to the community at large would be rather enlightening. I did do an email search to make sure one hadn’t been sent out.</li>
</ol>
<p>Perhaps I’m seeing the implementation on the admission side and am assuming it worked the same for all divisions/departments.</p>
<p>The first time I saw PS Campus Solutions was 2005. I worked full time at SSP for about 6 moths in 2008 (and someone else from admission was up there full time for 9 months). We stretched and tested the admission part of the product to simulate every possible case.</p>
<p>CavDog was an applicant over a year before any of you touched the system. 
We used his account (and others…everyone from Senfield, Star Wars, Looney Toons, and other shows had application accounts) to test the system as an applicant would use it. I have to imagine that the same was done for other areas of the system, but I obviously can’t speak for those teams.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, I can’t fix this one, which is why I suggested an email to SSP.</p>
<p>I imagine the testers weren’t pretending to be students. I bet when they were testing adding courses, they had a list of virtual “pretend” courses to add and remove, and they were watching out for whether the courses would show up on a transcript and whether the waitlist function worked, etc. etc. OK. The testers had an organised pre-arranged plan and the testing was non-chaotic because prolly everyone had prescribed roles and weren’t competing with one another for spots.</p>
<p>But perhaps the testing regime didn’t have testers pretending to be a student trying to choose among 30+ prospective “interesting” courses from across five departments and ultimately come with a reasonable number, and at the same time worry about scheduling and whether back to back courses were close enough to each other physically. I bet they weren’t trying to compose a tactful permission or waitlist note only to have SIS log you out because of its stupidly strict time limit. </p>
<p>What would have been really useful? What did they spend millions on? With that kind of money (and all that maintenance!) I would have thought you would have a system where you could drag and drop courses with ease, rapidly switch times or sections within the same course or have some interesting integrated functions with Collab. No but instead they have 5 different links about the same course, showing five different aspects that are NOT interclickable with one another! After VIEWING a course, to get enrolled, you have to click 6-12 different links to even <em>begin</em> enrolling in it! Is it waitlisted or permission only? Oh wait, 6 more clicks. Then if you actually get to enroll, you have to confirm that you really want to be enrolled in this course, and press a gazillion OK or NEXT buttons, and each page takes 10 seconds to load because SIS response times are so laggy.</p>
<p>You can be browsing your student finances and your loan awards … but oh wait! There’s no link to go back to a main overview of your finances or to another aspect, e.g. your bill. So you have to start all over again! Tree-browsing hierarchy is like a basic component of any end-user design… you know, like since the days of command line computing (user terminals, MS-DOS … not even Windows 3.1).</p>
<p>Added bonuses. SIS forbids you from opening new windows to browse courses. Why? Because apparently the engineer who designed it thinks the habit of opening new windows to save time is bad for your health and doesn’t want you to go on a tab-opening spree like people do on Wikipedia.</p>
<p>SIS also feels like it’s still in beta-mode. You can still see the design “scaffolding” everywhere. Why does the title bar read “employee-facing registry content”?</p>
<p>(Managing next semester’s courses on SIS is already slow even with Lou’s List. I can’t imagine how even slower it would be without it.)</p>
<p>I come here to solve problems and answer questions related to the college search and admission process. I want to be a resource, but I can’t be when the questions are about things way, way outside my area that I don’t control. Furthermore, flinging the comments about the SIS at me, as if I’m responsible for your troubles is not fair. </p>
<p>If you don’t want to email SSP directly, maybe you should email student council or start a Facebook or @UVA conversation (don’t know how @UVA works, as I don’t have access to it) to gather opinions and make a plan to bring about change, you’ll have more success than depositing your thoughts here.</p>
<p>Look at when I post…on weekends, in the morning, at night. I clearly want to help you enough to do it when I’m not in the office. I won’t be the receptacle for all complaints about the University, though. You need to find the proper channels to get your problems solved.</p>
<p>We’re not ranting to you Dean J, I think we’re just ranting in general. We know you don’t have influence over the SIS design. We are just discussing our issues.</p>
<p>Honestly, as a first year I have had absolutely no problem with SIS. I think maybe it’s because I didn’t have to re-learn a new system, transferring from ISIS to SIS, so I don’t have any idea of what is the “right” way or “easy” way (read: ISIS way).</p>
<p>But yeah, it seems pretty straightforward to just put the class in your enrollment requests then check the box and hit “enroll”. And it was very clear when I didn’t get enrolled in the Computer Science class I wanted…there was a huge red X saying I didn’t meet the capacity requirements (not in E-school). So I went back and picked another one.
The only little issue I had was that at first when I put Econ into my enrollment requests the discussion section wasn’t required, but when I went back later to enroll it said it was. So I ended up having to delete that Econ section and re-add it with the discussion attached, and that probably would have been irritating if the class was really full but luckily it wasn’t.</p>
<p>“Honestly, as a first year I have had absolutely no problem with SIS. I think maybe it’s because I didn’t have to re-learn a new system, transferring from ISIS to SIS, so I don’t have any idea of what is the “right” way or “easy” way (read: ISIS way).”</p>
<p>Exactly what this person said.</p>
<p>I didn’t like undergoing the switch from ISIS to SIS, and I don’t like the inferior way that one must search for classes, but it’s not impossible either.
With a little practice, it’s not too difficult to manage.
Deep breath Dean J, we still love you and Cav Dog (loved the Brownie picture)!</p>