The third floor of University Hall may one day become a foreign land to students - but not any time soon.
Three years after the University began the process of implementing Banner - a comprehensive program that will replace systems and databases used for admissions, financial aid and course registration - administrators cannot specify a launch date for the highly-anticipated online registration system. They do know that the process will take a long time, said Associate Provost Nancy Dunbar and Ellen Waite-Franzen, vice president for Computing and Information Services.
The Office of Admission and the Office of Financial Aid will begin using Banner in late September and late October of 2006, respectively, Dunbar said.
But plans for using Banner for course registration remain less clear.
"(Online) registration is going to be there after (the Office of Admission and the Office of Financial Aid start using Banner), but we don't have an absolute idea when," Dunbar said.
Last semester, the organization of those in charge of the project changed. Now, Dunbar leads an administrative group that is taking on more work related to the project. The University hired David Whiting, a consultant from the Columbia, S.C.-based consulting and training firm Cornelius and Associates, who began overseeing the day-to-day aspects of implementation two weeks ago. Dunbar described Whiting as "an experienced enterprise system director" who will ensure employees in all departments meet deadlines and will help prevent the University from getting behind schedule.
When administrators decided to bring Banner to Brown in early 2003, they expected online course registration to be ready in the spring of 2005. In October of 2004, The Herald reported that the University was pushing the launch date back to spring of 2006. Last semester, after administrators announced that the timeline in place did not take into account several factors that would delay a launch of the online registration system, Waite-Franzen tentatively told The Herald students would be able to register for their courses online in the spring of 2007.
The Office of the Registrar currently uses a system that is over 20 years old, Waite-Franzen said. Banner will replace that system and 10 others, including the Brown Online Course Announcement.
"Some of the systems (that Banner will replace) are very robust and healthy," Dunbar said. "Others aren't as good," she added.
WebCT is one program Banner will not replace, Dunbar said. WebCT will maintain its current functions and also facilitate Banner's inputting of academic records. Professors will enter students' grades throughout the semester into WebCT, which will then transfer final grades into Banner. Students will also have the option of allowing their parents to view their grades online, Dunbar said.
Once online course registration is set up through Banner, students' academic records will be put into the database. Eventually, students will have access to different types of records on Banner, including billing and financial aid information.
Online registration will prevent students from registering for courses for which they have not taken the prerequisites, Dunbar said. But she added that faculty will be able to override any restrictions, and each department will make its own decisions regarding prerequisites.
"There will be some experimenting to decide what's best," Dunbar said, in reference to how the new system will handle prerequisites.
Banner implementation will cost the University over $20 million, Waite-Franzen said. The software itself will cost less than $1 million, she added. The largest cost is paying over 100 people to work on the project, she said. Other expenses include hardware, storage and a database license. The database license alone will cost more than software consulting fees, Waite-Franzen said.
"We could easily have spent a lot more money," she said.
Last semester, Harvard University launched an online registration system, making Brown the only Ivy League school without some form of online registration.
The hundreds of universities that already employ Banner for online course registration systems include Dartmouth College, Yale and Rice universities and the College of William and Mary, Waite-Franzen said. Yale operates an older, more customized version of Banner, while Dartmouth, Rice and William and Mary use newer ones, Waite-Franzen said. She added that administrators she talked to at these schools were pleased with the program.
Jesse Silberberg, a freshman at Dartmouth, said Banner works well at his school. "I don't really notice it that much," he said.
The degree to which such a program registers in the mind of the student is a measure of its success, Dunbar said.
"It's working the best when you don't notice it," she said.
