Banner Student Information System
Report to the Faculty
May 1, 2007
The overall project:
The Banner implementation began in March 2006 with the charge to bring into production all modules in the Banner Student and Financial Aid systems by December of 2007. The Banner Student Information system will replace nearly a dozen stand-alone systems in admission, financial aid, registration and records, and accounts receivable for the College, the Graduate School, and the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
Following are major project milestones.
The project team has met each of its scheduled milestones. The “go-live” date is the point at which each module becomes fully operational. However, each module faces a number of challenges once it is in production. Admission and Financial Aid, which have been using Banner for over six months, continue as active project participants because, in an integrated system, changes in one area can affect other areas. Moreover, there are standard post-production challenges for every group: learning to operate in the new system, developing reports, training staff and developing documentation. Also important is the fact that, once a module is in production, there is a reduction in commitment of project resources so as to support the next critical milestone.
Online Registration
1. System performance: In the first three days of registration, 800-1000 students registered in the first 10 minutes; activity generally decreased sharply after about 30 minutes. While the greatest activity consistently was the first 10 minutes of each day, students logged on to Banner throughout the day. System performance was excellent. The graph at the end of this report illustrates registration activity during the initial days of registration.
2. Registration results: As of the close of registration:
· From a pool of 6,594 eligible students we have a total of 5,184 distinct students with registration activity (79%). 1,400 students that were eligible to register did not; about 700 of those were grad students. [The Registrar reports that in most previous pre-registration periods, about 1000 undergraduates did not register.]
· Of those students who registered, 1,467 are rising sophomores (92%), 1,386 rising juniors (80%), 1,303 rising seniors (88%) and 1,026 Grad Students (60%)
· We recorded a total of 26,088 Adds and 2,962 Drops.
2. The registration process: Students did not seem to find the registration process difficult. There were very few issues questions about how to use Banner to register for classes. The project team staffed two computer clusters but very few students came (e.g. a total of 7 over three days at the cluster in the Rock). Calls to hotline were generally light and usually restricted to mechanics. There were a number of calls on the first day of registration from students studying abroad. For students in some programs, their credits don’t transfer automatically and hence students’ standing is a semester lower than they anticipate. These students expected to be able to register with rising seniors but had to wait a day.
3. Access to classes due to enrollment limits: Excluding independent studies, thesis prep and the like, there are 1131 courses offered for Fall, 2007, 293 of which have enrollment limits. The number of courses that were closed because their enrollment limits were reached were as follows:
a. By 5:00 p.m. on 4/24: 9
b. By 7:59 a.m. on 4/25 (just before rising juniors registered): 11
c. By 5:00 p.m. on 4/25: 49
d. By 7:59 a.m. on 4/26 (just before rising sophomores registered): 61
e. By 5:00 p.m. on 4/26 98
4. Access to classes due to other restrictions (class level, concentration or general written permission): We do not have much data to go on at this point; an online survey is planned for later this week that we hope will provide additional feedback. However, we know that many students dislike written permission, either as a general requirement for a course or to override another restriction. [From a student’s point of view, the distinctions among Banner restrictions are not always important, for they all require a conversation with a faculty member to secure an override.]
There are fewer courses this fall that require written permission than there have been in the past.
· This fall, there were 293 limited enrollment courses and 121 courses that require written permission.
· Last fall, there were 33 sections that had an enrollment limit only, 105 that had written permission only, and 356 that had both an enrollment limit and required written permission.
Many faculty used other Banner restrictions instead of requiring written permission, and some called the Registrar’s Office during registration to ask that written permission be removed from courses.
5. Feedback at the MyÇourses site: Just over a hundred comments had been posted by 5:00 on 4/30. [An on-line survey will be distributed tomorrow to collect more detailed information about students’ experiences during pre-registration.] Concerns expressed in the MyCourses discussion mirror those that have been articulated earlier: objection to enforcement of enrollment limits and written permission during pre-registration, registering by seniority, the 8:00 start, and so forth.
The vast majority of the complaints, however, focus on the quality of the interface that students use to search for courses prior to registration. There are a number of possible strategies, both short and long term, to address these concerns. Among them are: expanded printed material, PDF files, enhancements that better integrate Banner schedule and catalog information, Banner interface design modifications, and so forth. The Banner team will continue to review options with the Dean of the College office in the coming months. While improvements for fall add/drop will be modest, feedback from pre-registration--and later from the add/drop period--will provide the basis for community discussion of the highest priority enhancements to Banner going forward.
Nancy R. Dunbar
Associate Provost, Banner Project Owner