Committee on Academic Policy and Procedures

Meeting Notes April 25, 2007

Attending:

Donnelly, Herspring, Wheatley, Pumphrey, Jackson, Niedfeldt, Morse, Perl, Hightower, Shanklin, Pence, Cochran, Nielsen, Devault, Crow

  1. Review Dean’s SWAT Team training: discuss methods to force practice. Suggestions were to set aside an hour a day dedicated to iSIS training and practice or to block time for side-by-side team practice.

  2. Brainstorm methods for training department staff and faculty in July beyond initial training by LASER staff.

    E-mail Mike Crow a list of names of those who should have access for set-up.

    Brian Arthaud-Day will come to each College for faculty training for Faculty Self Service. Fairchild Room 9 with 35 workstations can be available for training.

    Staff will need training for class schedule set-up.

    Departments will need training for Class Schedule, waitlist, waitlist over-ride. Departments will communicate with Dean’s Offices instead of Registrar’s Office or Enrollment Services.

    Five levels of security are still being worked on, and all roles are being better defined.

    Question about entering notes on requisites (e.g., recommended prerequisites or co-requisites): class notes may or may not be attached. May have to copy and paste.

    Question about graduate student issues: exempting graduate students from requisites. Will it be possible to centrally attach “or graduate student standing” (or something like that) to every course numbered 500 or higher with requisites? Or will that requisite have to be added to every course individually? Mike will check.

    Mike has added some advisees. Go into Self Service to see if some are listed.

    Will there be load testing? With software or other means? Capacity requested should be sufficient. Some transactions are “resource hogs.” SWAP (?) won’t drop course until course is added.

    Training is upcoming for over-rides and drop/add. See training schedule on SAMBA.

  3. Mike Crow Input.

    Thursday training sessions will continue.

    Bulk of decisions need to be made by September.

    Admissions will go-live on June 1.

    DARS is making good progress. DARS testing with requisites will be done in May. Student histories will be converted, with focus on students Fall 2006 to date since there are more than 600,000 in the legacy group. Test in May will be a subset – give Mike actual students for test group (examples of students that cover most scenarios) and test will be run with those actual students.

    Continuing questions about load. Is there a back-up plan? Have requested excess capacity. Can new enrollment and new requisite check be detached (e.g., disable requisite checking) if system overloads and crash is imminent?

    Simplify requisites when possible – when a sequence of courses is required, each requiring the previous course, use only the last course in the sequence as the prerequisite.

    Monty Nielsen reported on electronic catalog conversion. Committee is looking at technical tools, and “build or buy.” A product demonstration will be held on April 26 and 27. Update for next edition of the catalog will begin Fall 2007. Electronic catalog will be updated at least annually.

    Gunile DeVault and others visited the University of Kansas Enrollment Services. With implementation of PeopleSoft, KU reorganized their registrar’s office, re-wrote forms to fit system, had similar concerns about time required and system load. They are upgrading from version 8.0 to 9.0. Grades are submitted as a whole, not partial, grade submission. Grade changes continue to require a paper form. NO EXCEPTIONS for drop/add date policies. They now have a self-service center and a faculty/department center for enrollment and transcripts. Five computers are available for student use. Staff train students but will not do transactions for them. Their system does prerequisite checking but not waitlist. They hire temporary staff for catalog and course schedule development and maintenance. Our configuration is much different from KU – we have planned more capacity (10 servers).

    Arizona State University implemented PeopleSoft in Spring 2007 and had some problems with admissions go-live that brought the system to a standstill.

    Question about forms – to be developed by colleges? By departments? “To be determined.”