To the Editor:
There were a few items in the April 3 issue of The Herald that caught my attention.
Associate Provost Nancy Dunbar ("Approaching Banner," April 3) urged students to delay judgment on Banner until they have become "fluent" in it. I have spent considerable time looking at the way Banner displays course information, and I pity those that will be forced to use it. Previously we had the Brown Online Course Announcement, which was capable of searching for specific courses, and the Course Announcement Bulletin, which allowed a student to browse through all of Brown's offerings.
Banner removes the search feature without giving students a new way to browse for courses. The information for a given class is spread over four web pages, and scrolling through all 41 entries for CHEM 0330 (which take up a dozen pages) is enough to discourage anyone from using the system. From a technical standpoint, Banner displays all the information it ought to, but the process of finding classes will be a miserable task, even for students fluent in the system.
Nathanael Horton '09.5 and Jon Lin '08 seemed to think many people at Brown have been overreacting about Banner ("Banner catalog and schedule ill-recieved by students," April 3). What struck me about their comments is that they both admitted that they hadn't tested the system. I find it hard to understand why their uninformed opinion on Banner should matter to me.
Finally, if Stefan Smith '09 thinks this is "one of the most impractical applications I've seen on the (Brown) Web site," it is only because he is too new to the school to remember the old www.brown.edu page.
Daniel Leventhal '07April 4
To the Editor:
I would like to respond, by way of clarification, to the letter to the editor by K. Adam White '08 regarding cross-listings ("Interdisciplinary study requires printed course bulletin," April 4).
In Banner, all courses related to a subject are brought together in a single course listing called an XLIST. For example, in gender studies the course GNSS XLIST provides a complete list of courses offered in other departments that may be of interest to gender studies students. Soon, all departments will have a course called XLIST, and it will be the last course in the subject area within the Banner Class Schedule (not the Banner Catalog). These XLIST courses are being populated with their cross-listings now and will be ready for viewing in time for registration. We will e-mail students when that data entry task has been completed.
Here's the reason for the change: In our old system, cross-listings relied on "phantom" courses, i.e. the secondary cross-listing entries that held a number in a department but were not real courses. These could then be published in the Course Announcement Bulletin with the instruction that the student should register for the primary cross-listed course. However, building such bogus courses is not a possibility in Banner, and therefore there is nothing to publish. So, the change had nothing to do with the CAB but rather with the need to organize information in a new way in Banner. This is why we created a course in every department with a number of "XLIST" under which we list the courses that the department wishes to cross-list. Again, we will be in touch with students as soon as these data are complete.
Michael PestaUniversity RegistrarApril 5
