Enrollment goes online

Beth Moore

Caltech’s Office of the Registrar is preparing to launch web enrollment—the first in a series of Student Affairs web-based initiatives intended to use technology to more effectively serve students, faculty, and staff, and to do so in a paperless or near-paperless environment.

Known as REGIS, and developed in partnership with the Administrative Technology Center (ATC), the new system is scheduled to be available February 26, in time to streamline and automate registration for the spring term.

“This has been an exciting project. The web enrollment project was a dream for us all and now it’s matured to fruition,” says Associate Registrar Linda King, who worked with former registrar Judith Goodstein, Director of Student Information Systems Debi Tuttle, and an ATC team headed by Student Systems Development Team Lead Peter Lin, who served as project manager.

“The implementation process has been challenging and exciting,” Lin agrees. He notes that students, faculty, and administrative staff were also part of the design phase, with their inputs considered and incorporated when possible. “Hopefully this system will make the registration process easier for everyone,” he says.

“This has definitely been a team effort,” Goodstein says, adding with a laugh, “We’ve spent hours and hours in meetings—I hope there’s a payoff for students.” Noting that students often just slide registration packets under advisors’ doors at odd hours, she also hopes the new system “fosters more one-on-one dialogue,” with advisors receiving electronic notices and contacting their advisees for face time.

According to King, having students enter their own schedule information will save processing time and increase accuracy, as her staff currently inputs approximately 4,000 lines of data for under-
graduates and 3,200 lines for graduate students, working from paper forms. She forecasts that the usual handful of students who report data-entry errors each term will no longer need to.

REGIS will allow online course browsing and selection and will include enrollment verification checks, with appropriate alerts on student status, schedule conflicts, course underloading and overloading, duplicate enrollment, and space restrictions. Faculty advisors will receive an e-mail alert when a student’s schedule is ready for approval, and can then review and approve the schedule online.

The web enrollment period will replace the existing two-week mail registration period, beginning at 8 a.m. Thursday, February 26 (the day after Drop Day), and continuing until 5 p.m. Wednesday, March 10. During enrollment, students may add and drop courses freely, and advisors will review and approve schedules to complete the student’s enrollment. By the end of enrollment, all students must have an approved schedule in the system.

“I thought it was easy to use,” says undergraduate Alex Sheive ‘05, who helped test the application, “and will greatly improve the entire enrollment procedure by doing away with the tedious and archaic act of requiring advisors to sign a piece of paper.”

A Caltech e-mail account is needed to utilize REGIS. More details, including log-in information and FAQs, are available at www.registrar.caltech.edu. The Registrar’s Office can be reached at ext. 8866 or regis@caltech.edu.

With enrollment’s move into cyberspace, the next step is to begin transferring other manual functions onto the web, such as transcripts and entering of grades. King says she has gained a lot from working with the REGIS implementation team, and is eagerly awaiting the next project.

“What I’ve learned will help me to better serve the Caltech community,” she says. “Now, we are all looking forward to the next phase with the same excitement and anticipation. The difference is we are far more experienced, and it will only get better.”

Beth Moore is associate director of the ATC’s CARE (Caltech Administrative Resources and Education) office, which provides comprehensive administrative systems support to the campus community.
•