The first public demonstration of Banner's online course registration system was given last night by Associate Provost Nancy Dunbar to an audience of 13 students in Salomon 001.
Dunbar, who serves as Banner project owner, went over the aspects of registration that directly apply to students, including the relationship between advisers and students, the course search feature that will replace the Brown Online Course Announcement and the registration procedure itself.
She used a PowerPoint presentation instead of the interactive Banner client because the Banner interface is still under development.
"We're still in a test environment, and things are always changing in a test environment," she said.
Dunbar emphasized the difference between the current pre-registration process - where all advising and paperwork take place during a two-week period - and pre-registration under Banner, which will be longer and segmented. Under Banner, most pre-registration advising for the Fall 2007 semester will take place from April 2 to 20 and rising seniors - the first to register under the new system - will begin pre-registering on April 24.
Dunbar then demonstrated how the new course search feature, which is divided into two sections, will function. Students who want to learn general information about a course will use the "course catalog" for multi-departmental searches and searches for multiple professors or attributes at once, similar to features provided by the student-run Mocha system but not the University's BOCA site.
"The catalog will be the complete compendium of courses offered at Brown," Dunbar said.
Students who want to know term-specific details about a course, such as where it is meeting and certain course restrictions, will consult the "course schedule."
Finally, Dunbar showed students how they would register for courses. She explained that each course has a unique course reference number, which can be used to register for a course by simply typing it into the appropriate field and clicking submit. If students do not know a course's reference number, they can pull up a list of courses from the course catalog, highlight the ones they wish to take and click submit to register.
Dunbar also clarified a few of the changes that would be made to course descriptions under Banner. Department codes will be four letters long instead of two - for example, the anthropology department will be "ANTH" instead of "AN," and the biology department will be "BIOL" instead of "BI." Course numbers will be four digits instead of three, so that Banner will treat different sections of a course as entirely separate courses, allowing students to enroll in multiple sections of a given course.
"The same logic applies, we just needed more space to build more courses," Dunbar said.
The student audience raised a number of questions that had not been asked at any previous forum.
Cassie Rogg '09 asked about Banner's limit of registering for five courses, which didn't seem to accommodate half-credits.
Don Thibault, a representative of SunGard Higher Education, the company that produces Banner, clarified that Banner's limit is five credits, not five courses.
"You could technically take 10 half credit courses if you could find them," Thibault said.
Bentley Rubinstein '09 said he felt the override process for course restrictions such as course caps and pre-requisites would have less immediacy under Banner than it does now. Currently, a professor effectively grants a complete override by signing an add/drop form, which is done right in front of the student. But under Banner, there would be a delay between a student's request for an override and when it is granted.
Jonathan Hahn '10 asked whether Banner had a built-in waitlist feature or if professors would manage course waitlists.
Dunbar said Banner did come with a waitlist feature but the University's Banner team had elected not to implement it.
"Brown faculty use waiting lists in many different ways, so we wanted to let them do whatever they wanted to do," she said, adding that Banner's waitlist feature counts waitlist courses against the limit of five, which the team felt would be too harsh a commitment for students.
By the demonstration's end, students told The Herald they felt it had gone well.
"I think (Dunbar) did a good job of explaining the process of registration," said Cara Mazzucco '10, who had not attended previous Banner forums. "I'm a little less worried now than I was coming in."
