Dear Brian:

I am writing to respond to your article about the telephone registration system here at RU. As I read the article I felt the need to clarify some of the points and to try and let you know where I see RU going in terms of registration. First I want to say that I appreciate your concerns because without hearing from students, I would lose touch with what the needs and wants of our students at RU are.

In the first paragraph your main concern is the busy signal that students often experience when calling the Voice Response System (VRS). We are concerned with this also but I would like to offer some solutions to the frustration experienced by students in this area. Students are allowed 72 hours from their initial appointment time to access the registration system. The phone lines are up and running from 7 a.m. to midnight. We know, from monitoring the system, that the lines are not very busy from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. or from 9 p.m. to midnight. Students would have an excellent chance of "getting through" if they tried to register during these off-peak times. Also, we distribute appointment times based on the number of hours a student has earned and spread those appointments out over a two week period so that there are never more than about 2500 students eligible to access the system at any given period, with a significantly fewer number as we get into the sophomore and freshmen classes. This is because we realize that classes are getting tight and that students in these classes will take longer to register because of needing to scan for open classes, etc. If we work together we can make the access to the system work more smoothly.

Further along in the second paragraph you talk about 9000 students trying to get into a course that only holds 30 people and is "mandatory". This is not the case. Courses that are mandatory by name and number, English 101 or Psychology 121 for example, offer enough sections to accommodate the entire freshmen class either all in the fall semester (in the case of English 101) or half in the fall and half in the spring semesters (in the case of Psychology 121). I'm not sure what is meant about a "backup plan" in the same paragraph but I would think you were referring to students having an alternate schedule prepared in the event that they came across closed classes. Also, the scan function is available to locate open sections of courses. Additionally, in the instructions in the Course Schedule Booklet it talks about the Advising Centers for each Academic College. They are to be used by students as resources when problems are experienced with the registration system. These centers have registration access to solve student problems with closed classes, etc. I would like to add that students now have five fifteen minute sessions to access the registration system, not the three mentioned in your article. In regard to blocks, the admission ticket that the student picks up before registering shows if a block has been placed on their record, thus allowing the student to take care of the block before entering the registration system.

You are absolutely correct in the next paragraph where you discuss WEB Registration. My office is working on this with our Computer Services Department and our software vendor. Unfortunately, some projects have taken priority over the implementation of WEB registration, one being the need to tackle our Year 2000 conversion and another being turnover in programmers within the Computer Services Department. I can assure you that we will be pursuing this option in the not too distant future and hope to have some other applications up and running shortly. We want to make certain that all security issues have been examined and that everyone, including the students, are satisfied with the integrity of the WEB applications.

I would add that we currently have 23 phone lines coming in to the VRS and that a concern we have is that the registration program is a CPU time hog. We may be able to extend our registration sessions to 30 with the WEB but need to ensure that it does not cripple the system for the other users and for the students attempting to access registration. Our plan is for students to have three methods available to them to perform registration: on-line in the Advising Centers, over the VRS (telephone), and on the WEB. Brian, I hope I've answered some of your questions and concerns and would welcome the opportunity to speak with you directly if you desire. Let me know and we can make an appointment for us to get together. Thanks again for your concerns. I think we are on the same page in terms of perfecting service to students.

 
Chris Knauer
University Registrar