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Registration goes on-line

BY SALLY ACHARYA

When students register for spring semester, the only line that might be busy will be the phone line.

Students began using AU's new on-line system this week to register for spring classes. "It's a new era," says Jack Child, director of the Center for Teaching Excellence. AU students can now finalize their class schedules from their home computers, without even the need for the trip to the registrar that had marked the partially computerized system of the 1990s.

It's many steps removed from the era when Child waited in "long, long, long lines" as an AU student. Back then, lines snaking through the old gymnasium at registration time "were likened unto bread lines in Russia," recalls Lee Marrs '67, a former Eagle cartoonist who is now an animator in Berkeley, Calif. "The joke was, you could become a junior waiting for registration."

As for faculty members-like Child, who later joined the Department of Language and Foreign Studies, College of Arts and Sciences (CAS)-their place was at the head of the line, at departmental tables, where they spent days signing paperwork that ended up smudged with ink and stained with coffee.

"I've been here 22 years, and it used to be . . ." registrar Don Bunis pauses and then says wryly, "a big party." Over the years, "it got more civilized, and it's even more civilized now."

The new system, accessed through the <my.american.edu> portal, tells students if courses are full, if they need prerequisites, or if a course conflicts with their schedules. Students must still visit with their academic advisors, who complete the first step in the process by discussing the student's progress and course options and "signing" the proposed schedules electronically. But after the electronic signature, students can register at any time by logging onto the portal from any computer in the world.

Graduate students have already begun using the system, along with some undergraduates who are queued by seniority. All will eventually register on-line.

The on-line system was designed largely by campus staff, who customized and upgraded Datatel to make it as intuitive as possible and to address the needs of AU users. "An awful lot of people on campus put an awful lot of effort" into making it happen, says Carl Whitman, executive director of e-operations.

The new "advising wizard" will allow students and their advisors to view a range of options at a glance, such as a list of courses that would satisfy particular requirements, and how a student's current courses would count toward other majors if the student switched departments.

On-line registration has been awaited for a long time. Plans to move to a fully on-line system were nearly completed in 1996-before most universities offered the service-when they were put on hold after a change in data systems, and AU's registration system fell temporarily behind the technological curve.

While many tech-savvy students over the past few years had been frustrated by the lack of on-line registration, the new system has been praised by students who evaluated it recently. Bunis says that testers who were familiar with other on-line registration systems, such as those at the University of Maryland, said that AU's system compared favorably or was noticeably better. Says Bunis: "It's a very powerful tool."