Manual process no more! Redesigning student declaration in SIS
Fun fact: Oracle Student Admin doesn’t provide functionality to manage student degree program and major declaration. Oh, the information exists in the Student Program/Plan pages within SIS, but there is no option for allowing that information to be dynamically updated by the hundreds of individuals that work with students to declare their majors and certificates, or transfer from one school/college to another. For the first 15 years UW–Madison was live on Oracle/PeopleSoft, any time a student needed to change their declared major and/or switch schools/colleges after being admitted to the university, those changes were submitted to the Office of the Registrar via one of two paper (paper!) forms. The RO then keyed all that information into the Student Information System by hand!
Thankfully, back in 2013 these forms were shifted to pages within SIS, and the the vast majority of the program/plan declaration changes entered into these pages by advisors and school/college deans’ offices began being automatically updated in SIS. Only problem was, the two paper forms that previously existed simply evolved into two separate and distinct pages within SIS, which meant that the end-user still had to know which page to use based on what update they were trying to make to the student record.
To provide a more intuitive and seamless user experience, and a more modern infrastructure and configuration, the Office of the Registrar Student Services team has just launched a newly redesigned Student Program/Plan Requests page within SIS, replacing the previous Update Academic Program and Major/Certificate Requests pages. In the first week of being live with the new form, 309 program/plan update or change requests have been submitted by 60 users, impacting the records of 268 students. The project team is staffing Open Labs to support the transition for campus partners and have heard comments like “Used the new form for the first time, very nice and easy to use!” and “I thought I needed training but this is really simple…I’ve got this!”
Huge thanks to the project team, who spent many hours together mapping the existing process, engaging with stakeholders to understand their challenges and expectations, and redesigning the page/process from the user perspective.
Jessi Arnfelt, Katie Block, Corey Campbell, Amy Landgren, Debbie Moy, Katie Paar, Priya Sachithanandam, Beth Warner and Cheryl Wise. Special shout out to RO developer, Heather Hollister, whose approach in seeing beyond what was and truly achieving a redesigned and streamlined page supported by more modern coding (all while patiently processing the “special sauce” that our academic structure and our end-users require).