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4/25/05
TO: Faculty
FROM: The 1College Project Advisory Committee
(Ashley Finley, Walt Chromiak, Seth Allen, Arlene Bones, Brenda Bretz, Ann Dykstra, Karen Faryniak, Christina Van Buskirk)
DATE: April 25, 2005
As promised in the February Faculty Meeting materials, the Advisory Committee held meetings throughout March and April to provide information and— more importantly—to gather feedback and input from faculty and academic department staff associates on the 1College Project.
These sessions were well-attended with well over 100 different individuals representing all academic departments. Thanks again to all of you who took the time to attend and participate actively in these meetings.
Many of the comments made and issues raised were not directly related to and perhaps cannot be resolved by an Administrative Software Package. A complete listing of all issues and concerns raised are available on the 1College Project Web site (http://1college.dickinson.edu). A summary of those raised most often:
Expectations/enhancements to current environment:
- Greater access to information for decision-making
- Campus-wide calendar for scheduling of meetings, appointments and events
- Elimination of redundant data entry and maintenance of that information
- Emails to targeted groups (majors, dept members, etc)
- Easy-to-read and understand budget reports
As we proceed with this project, we are committed to these general principles:
- Communicate information to faculty, staff and students and obtain feedback on design decisions
- Maintain existing functionality, particularly those ‘in house’ advancements (ex: photos with classlists)
- Maintain an approach appropriate to Dickinson that balances the efficiencies of the computer with a structure that encourages interaction and collective decision-making
This important work will continue throughout the summer. There will be additional opportunities for faculty to participate in the design and testing of the system over the next months and into the fall semester. Please consult the 1College Project Web site (http://1college.dickinson.edu) for additional information and always feel free to contact any of us on the committee.
Faculty Focus Group Meeting
Current Concerns
- How can we be sure faculty know of creative advancements that are possible
- That Banner focuses on larger Universities opposed to smaller colleges similar to Dickinson College
- That faculty may be alienated from project
- Need for more deptl strategic planning and year-long course scheduling
- Scheduling conflicts (Advisor interacts with students and the students needs two classes but they conflict with each other. This goes along with year long planning)
- Inefficient way of viewing student information for Advising purposes
- Scheduling of instructional space
- Current online system’s flow is too difficult to navigate
- Appearance and clarity of online budget reports needs to be improved
- Cannot maintain old emails because of system storage capacity (loss of archival materials since emails replacing paper memos)
- Inefficient use of paper for job searches
- Currently use many stand-alone Excel, Access or other databases to support college committees (SXC, R&D, etc)
- Cannot gain access to previous term info (directory, students, grades, etc)
- Future planning based on students going abroad (Advising issues)
- Decentralized Advising (Perhaps, come up with a means of forcing the student to meet with their advisor)
- Degree of difficulty to access and view reports.
- WebCT vs. Blackboard
- How will decision be made
- What are pros/cons for faculty usage
- Abroad Issues
- Signatures (burdensome; inefficient to continue to review something already approved)
- Transferred courses (how to evaluate and determine equivalencies)
- Previously approved courses from abroad
- How to determine continued eligibility/how to know when syllabus changes
- Transcripts without names
- Loss of in-house developed applications
- Minors
- registration priority
- tracking
- Students PCs should all be set-up the same configurations. Other institutions have their PCs configured by the institutions IT dept.
Expectations & Requests for Future
- Access to information on alumni career paths
- One system that used campus-wide
- Electronic submission of course scheduling from departments
- Mass emailing of targeted groups (Depts., classes, etc.)
- Viewing detailed financial information in an efficient and clear manner
- Trend analysis for U-grades by department
- Easier way to view information on advisees
- ex: e-notification of students with "U" grades
- E-portfolio
- Access to reports online needed on a daily basis with drill down capability (particularly for budgets)
- Online calendar of events on campus where each department can enter their events (broader version of the Compass)
- Calendaring system for all on campus
- Efficiently schedule meetings
- Interface to show office hours, class teaching schedule
- Permit students to schedule appts with faculty/advisors
- Interface with Blackboard through the portal
- Proxy login for departmental assistants to access faculty classlists, info on majors, budgets. etc
- Solution to eliminate redundant data entry for uniquely designed foci of majors (ex: International Studies)
- Calculate Major GPA
- On-line repository of course equivalencies from study abroad
- Access to student bio information to gain familiarity with students
- Priority for dept. minors during registration
- Budget reports for each dept. Improved presentation without paper copies
- Ability to maintain more information on faculty (including publications, papers given, etc) in campus-wide system
- Ease of data entry by new faculty members to provide information (ability to update CV on line)
- Use of portal to consolidate information
