Students may never again see a busy class registration screen, with the implementation of Integrated Student Internet Services or ISIS, appropriately named after the Goddess of Communication, Isis.
Hopkins is one of the first schools around the country to implement the integrated services system, formerly called SCT Matrix. When the entire system is up and running in June of 2005, students will be able to register and update information 24 hours a day.
The program will be extended to all of Hopkins' part time affiliates, and ISIS has already begun on the Homewood Campus. Offering services to the Class of 2007, the office of Admissions undertook the first part of the program this March.
The "prospects" portion of the system was instituted for admissions, allowing potential students to facilitate contact with admissions officials, as well as allowing admissions easy access to grade reports and histories. There are five "modules" of the ISIS system, including Registration, Admissions, Student Billing, Financial Aid and COMMON (Biographical student information). Access to Financial Aid information will be available online for prospective students in November of 2003, and for the rest of the applicant pool in March 2004.
"It's an ongoing process," Registrar Heddy Schaedel said of the staggered ISIS phases.
"If you think about building a building, there are a lot of different aspects to manage," said Denise Antinari, manager of Hopkins Internet Technology Services.
The Student Web Services, which have experienced backlogs in the past, have only been a temporary system, according to Schaedel. Instituted simultaneously with an ISIS initiative, Web Services "was an interim solution while researching the ISIS."
Amid complaints of this year's online registration, Schaedel says steps have been taken to improve the system. The registrar restricted logins for all other students on Monday, as well as shortened the time period, easing the Web site's load. As for other adjustments, the registrar has done "a lot of fine tuning," Schaedel said. "There should have been an improvement in performance, though it wasn't good, it should have been better," she said.
Switching directly from paper registration to Web services, Hopkins bypassed other registration systems used in other universities, such as telephone registration. With 2,053 students registering online, the majority of the fall semester schedules were made with the Web services. With less than a third of the class registering in person, Associate Registrar Betsey Paul feels the process was an overall success.
"We'd still be entering registrations right now," Paul said. "A lot of the people who showed up on Friday just didn't trust the system."
With these projects and amelioration to Web services simultaneously in action, Schaedel says the office is busy "running things in parallel."
Citing the office of the registrar's "commitment to service," Schaedel said ISIS will help students "better manage their own business processes."
"When performance isn't great, we're not happy either," she said.
