BR, TD register online

To accompany Timothy Dwight's current brick-and-mortar renovation and Branford's recent facelift, a pilot registration program will now enable students from those two residential colleges to register for courses electronically. This novel program may soon expand to serve all undergraduates this spring.

Online course registration is an experiment prompted by the Yale College Teaching and Learning Committee's concerns over the length of time it takes professors receive to class lists, Registrar Barry S. Kane explained. Faculty members currently receive lists of students enrolled in their class by the beginning of October.

Despite the potential employment of the Internet's robust capabilities, students must still meet with their faculty advisor and obtain appropriate signatures before their schedule is finalized, effectively maintaining some, if not all, of the traditional paper process' strength: increased advisor-student interaction.

Last fall, the Administration began to consider the possibility of online course registration to overhaul what some students feel is an unnecessarily laborious process. An enhanced course selection engine that allows students to search for classes by such criteria as meeting time is being developed to accompany the remodeled registration process.

Kane adds, "It is difficult to pick a wrong course [since] students no longer have to enter long registration numbers."

Students in Branford and TD can also prepare a personalized schedule online. "It is not just online course registration; it is also designed to assist students during shopping period," Kane said. He added that students may print out their worksheet daily and modify it as they shop classes. "It is much easier in terms of selecting a course," Freshman Counselor Joshua Wolf, BR '01, said.

With the new system, students' course selection enters a "holding table," and after shopping period ends, the registrar's office sends residential college deans a list of students who expect to enroll in certain classes. Deans will then electronically approve schedules, allowing the student's registration to directly enter a live database. Because of direct data entry by the students themselves, the registrar's office will be spared the countless hours of labor currently required to enter 8,000 undergraduate and graduate schedules into the database.

"So far, we have had no real problems," Kane said. "It is all working as we had hoped. It is very heartening." Kane added that Branford and TD were not chosen for any specific reason other than the colleges' respective deans showed interest in participating.

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