Students and faculty were given a live demonstration of Banner's online registration feature last night as part of a briefing for the upcoming mock registration, slated to begin next Monday.
Lisa Mather, associate registrar for registration services, demonstrated the registration and override processes on the Banner interface for the audience of six students and one professor. Her presentation was intended to prepare participants - Meiklejohn advisers, members of the Undergraduate Council of Students and faculty members - for mock registration, a debugging program meant to detect flaws in the online registration system by having students and faculty purposely mis-enter data or try to gain access to restricted pages.
But Mather's presentation also offered a quick glance at some areas of the user interface not previously seen publicly, including the system intended to replace the Brown Online Course Announcement and several error screens. She also displayed the main student and faculty pages, which had only been seen in a recorded tutorial but not previously with live interaction.
Mather demonstrated that students would be able to register for a course or change grade options and other course preferences with only three clicks of the mouse once they are logged in.
"It's pretty simple once you get in there," Mather said.
But faculty members don't have it quite as easy. In order to grant an override to a student restricted from registering for a course - the most hotly debated procedural issue - a faculty member must make a minimum of eight clicks of the mouse and more if the student's Banner identification number isn't readily available and must be searched.
"The system is pretty intuitive, especially from the student's perspective," said Don Thibault, a representative of SunGard Higher Education, the company that produces Banner. "It gets a little more complicated for professors."
Brian Becker '09, UCS campus life committee chair, asked if there would be an e-mail alert system built into Banner so that students would be informed immediately if they were granted a course override instead of having to repeatedly click the refresh button on their Internet browsers.
Mather answered that the feature was not currently available, but she said the Banner team has been working hard to ensure that overrides and other transactions would be handled smoothly by both students and professors.
Thibault said an auto-alert feature could and probably would be added as part of a "second phase" of Banner's implementation.
"Auto-notifies and in-system transactions may be present in the future," he said, adding that the University had purchased other SunGard software products to allow for additional features.
Many of the issues raised at the meeting will be discussed further today at 5:30 p.m., when Associate Provost Nancy Dunbar, the Banner project owner, gives a public demonstration of online registration at a forum in Salomon 001.
