Between course registration cards, advisor signatures and Phase II, signing up for spring classes will be a time-consuming process for many students this week. But what if registration occurred online and no Phase II was necessary?
Over the past two years, Information Technology (IT) and the Office of the Registrar have worked with faculty, staff and students to develop a Student Information System (SIS) that would be a "one-stop shop" for Bowdoin community members, according to Chief Information Officer Mitch Davis.
The College spent more than a year working with the software company PeopleSoft Partners, LLC, to fine-tune an SIS to meet Bowdoin's needs, Davis said. The tailored system would include the schedules and academic records that Bearings offers now, as well as online course registration, and access to all personal records, including student health records and on-campus employment information.
"It's a system that we would believe the College could move forward with for a long time," Davis said.
"We need it and want it for lots of reasons," Registrar Christine Brooks Cote said. "It would update our systems in many ways. It would speed up Bearings for students and faculty, improve the interface, and bring online registration. It would give us improved coding possibilities in our database that would allow for all kinds of things that are impossible now."
Last fall's stock market crash, however, prompted the College to halt the implementation of a SIS, a process that would cost more than $1 million, according to Cote.
"Right at this moment, since we're doing all this work to manage costs, it's just not the time to insert a brand new application that would cost a lot of money," Davis said.
Despite economic setbacks, Davis hopes to implement an SIS within the next two years.
"My hope is that within the next two years there will be an SIS system and that's what I'm working towards," he said. "Because the management maintenance of our existing solution is impossible and it's just not the right way to go."
When the economy improves, implementing an SIS is first on the College's list of things to do.
"There's nothing else in front of it," Davis said. "It's the first thing up that we're going to do. The minute we have the funds we're going to do it."
An SIS would affect all areas of communication at the College, which is why implementing one would be costly. Because an SIS would include information such as medical history, alumni records and on-campus employment information in addition to course schedules, registration and academic records, integrating one into the College's existing system would be a time-consuming and detailed process.
"It's not just one thing. It's all interconnected," Davis said. "SIS is the core piece that distributes all of it."
Because an SIS would play an integral role in of many of the College's departments, IT and the registrar's office would want to ensure its functionality before introducing it to the campus.
"Once it's all digital, it has to be right. There has to be a way of backing it up. You need to feel that it's at 100 percent," Davis said. "It takes money to do that, and time."
"It would be difficult to implement but would be a huge benefit in the end," Cote said.
While IT has added functions to Bearings little by little over the past few years, continuing to do so is no longer fiscally efficient or feasible.
"Anything we add now is so big that you'd rather put the money and the time and the effort into an actual solution," Davis said.
Davis added that Bearings is "not a truly automated system," which makes it cumbersome for the registrar's office and IT to keep it running.
Until funds become available, IT will continue to refine the kind of system that will work best for the College so that when the time comes, Bowdoin's SIS will fully meet student, faculty and staff needs.
"For me, that one piece is core for making things run really well," Davis said.