IT Systems and Operations streamlines Spring Registration
The staff of Information Technology at Lee knows that no one likes to stand in long lines, especially when they don’t need to. That is why, for Spring 2013 registration, IT pulled out all the stops to make registration relatively painless, streamlined, and automated.
“We’re here for the students,” said IT Business Analyst LeAnn McElrath.
In the past few years, IT has made vast improvements regarding its role in the process that have made the procedure easier for everyone.
One of these improvements is the creation of a kiosk at the registration site where a student can scan his or her ID card to access a data sheet, which gives the student all necessary information about his or her registration status.
The kiosk, which is in its fourth semester of operation, thus eliminates the need for students to wait in multiple lines trying to figure out where they stand in the process.
“We used to have students stand in line for a long time, going through all of the registration checkpoints, only to find out that they had already been cleared and didn’t need to be there,” said Sr. Programmer Analyst Robert VanHook. “The kiosk automates a lot of those processes.”
It also saves trees, according to VanHook. In the past, IT would print approximately 3500 data sheets for students the night before on-campus registration began.
Many of these sheets were left unused because a great number of students confirmed enrollment online beforehand and were not in attendance, so the paper was wasted.
McElrath said that more students are now opting to confirm enrollment online instead of coming to campus on the registration days, and VanHook said that that is where all of this work in automation is headed.
“Ideally, we’d like it if students didn’t have to come at all,” VanHook said.
However, since that day has not yet arrived, IT still works very hard to help on-campus registration to run smoothly and efficiently. IT starts amalgamating and setting up the approximately 100 computers it needs for the two-day event weeks in advance.
During the actual event, the IT staff is present to deal with, according to McElrath, “totally random technology-related things,” such as network connection problems.
When registration is over, IT spends the rest of the evening doing teardown – no matter how long it takes. In the past, staff has worked until midnight reprogramming computers and putting them back where they belong.
However, this practice has more recently been simplified by the acquisition of multiple virtual computers called thin clients. Instead of having to bring a monitor and the actual computer, staff members just grab the mouse, the keyboard, and the network cable and go.
IT plans to continue to improve the registration-day process for students until it reaches the eventual goal of majority online registration.
“Just about every year we’ve streamlined more and done something different,” McElrath said.
Photo credit:
Line: freedigitalphotos.net
Tree: blmiers2 / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA