From: technews <technews@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: Universities Offer 'Self Service' Degree Information (Chr
Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1999 09:43:49 -0600
Tuesday, November 9
Smart Software Lets Universities Offer 'Self Service' Degree Information
By FLORENCE OLSEN
As "self service" becomes the model for all kinds of student services, more
universities are gearing up to use the World-Wide Web to let students audit
their progress toward meeting degree requirements.
Faculty advising is changing, too, as the same technologies make it possible
for faculty members -- without any special training -- to read and generate
degree-audit reports, says Charles Theodore Hurley III, the assistant
registrar at Notre Dame University, one of the institutions taking advantage
of the new technology.
At Notre Dame, new on-line reports replace dense, static pages of Cobol
computer code, text, and symbols that "frightened professors away pretty
quickly," Mr. Hurley says.
The new software makes faculty members "instant experts" on degree
requirements, he says, which means that more professors can be involved in
advising undergraduate students. An interactive audit can be completed so
quickly that professors have time left over in their 20-minute appointment
slots to talk to the students about other concerns.
Sometime next year, if all goes according to plan, students will be able to
call up their degree-requirement information themselves, administrators say.
But getting there has not been easy, Mr. Hurley said in an interview. Giving
a new face to degree-audit reports took Notre Dame the better part of two
years.
"We thought our first attempt was good enough," he says. "But the academic
deans thought otherwise."
The hard part for everyone involved, Mr. Hurley says, was finding ways to
display lots of detailed information on a single Web screen and still keep
the screen simple enough to be readable. To demonstrate, he navigated to an
indecipherable screen of computer-coded course requirements, and said, "This
is a lot of what we stuffed behind the scenes.
Notre Dame's new degree-audit system is the type of student-centered
application that colleges and universities seem eager to develop as they
abandon what many people now think of as an outdated "inconvenience" model
of higher education.
"Let's face it, we made it hard for students to register or get financial
aid, and we didn't feel badly about that," says Regina Kleinman, a senior
projects leader in the president's office at Seton Hall University. "But the
times have changed for a host of reasons, and we no longer embrace that
attitude," she says.
For years, many universities required students to request audit reports in
person from the registrar's office, permitting them to pick up the documents
the following day after showing a form of photo identification. Some
institutions still require students to wait as long as 10 business days to
receive the reports -- which show their progress toward meeting degree
requirements -- and then charge the students $3, Mr. Hurley says.
The information that universities distributed to deans and advisers two or
three times a year was almost always out of date because a student had
dropped a class, or a grade had been changed, he says.
With on-line degree-audit programs, faculty advisers can recalculate
grade-point averages or degree requirements "within split seconds," Mr.
Hurley says. The program in use at Notre Dame displays a big check mark in
the box next to each requirement that is completed, and a blank box next to
each requirement not yet fulfilled.
Mr. Hurley says the smart software knows, for example, to allow a single
course to satisfy two separate requirements, but not to count the course
twice in calculating a G.P.A. It provides uniform advice to the deans and
faculty advisers, he says. "No one's telling students different stories."
It will be another year before Notre Dame officials actually give students
the keys to the university's new degree-audit system. If the software isn't
thoroughly debugged, Mr. Hurley says, it could end up displaying inaccurate
information.
"Students are going to immediately see this as a contract," he says, which
is why the academic deans and faculty advisers will test-drive the new
software for a full year before the students themselves start using it.
But even then, he says, the software will carry a disclaimer that the
academic dean, and not the audit software, is the final arbiter of who's
going to graduate and who isn't.
On their own, he says, students will be able to use the new software to find
out what their degree requirements would be if they suddenly switched majors
or changed to a different college within the university. "In very rare
cases," he says, "a set of degree requirements could even be built for one
student."
Most degree-audit programs work by comparing a student's official
computer-coded academic records with computer-coded course requirements
listed in the university's undergraduate or graduate catalogues.
Because every college and university catalogue is different, writing the
"parser" -- or syntax analyzer -- for degree-audit software that would work
for any institution was "the really tough part," says Michael Fox, a
vice-president of Software Research Northwest. The Seattle-area company
developed the DegreeWorks audit program that Notre Dame is using.
The screens that display student information, he says, are linked to
particular classes of users -- students, staff members, faculty advisers, or
deans -- and are secured by user I.D. and pin-number combinations.
After faculty advisers started using the degree-audit software, Mr. Hurley
says, Notre Dame had to upgrade its computer memory and central processor to
improve the speed with which the degree-audit computer, an HP 3000 server,
responded to requests.
Mr. Hurley says that the finished software doesn't look complex, but that
appearances are deceiving. "We had to go through a lot to get it to do
this."
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Copyright 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education