University to Rufus Initiative team on basic setup: "Ok, with some changes"
138 attend validation sessions to help configure two essential system modules
By Sean O'Malley
September 30, 2009
OHIO is one step closer to a new Student Information System (SIS). In six sessions held during August and September, 138 representatives from across the university helped validate the way PeopleSoft will process student biographic and demographic data as well as how the system will store the university's academic structure.
According to project director Shelley Ruff, much remains to be done before PeopleSoft will be ready for a public test drive. Still, the information gathered in these sessions will be invaluable as the team configures the system's basic building blocks.
Campus Community: biographic and demographic data
At its most basic level, the new SIS needs to track who students are, where they come from, and how to contact them. The PeopleSoft module that does this is called Campus Community.
Setting up Campus Community might seem like a simple task, but the level of detail required by an institution the size of Ohio University is quite high. The module not only needs to account for a wide variety of address types but also needs to track specialized personal data for specific programs, departments and subsets of the student body.
Issues raised in the Campus Community validation sessions include:
- disability-related records for those who register with Disability Services and Residential Housing
- immunizations required for specific academic programs
- multiple address types, including where to send application materials, parental addresses, overseas addresses, and military/APO/FPO locations
- the need to add TTY/TDD to the list of telephone types
- potential for using a cell phone data field to facilitate emergency text message notifications
- consistent syntax for name suffixes like Jr and Sr
- a decision not to use prefixes like Mr, Mrs, Ms, Dr, etc. in the new system
- a second e-mail field in addition to the student's university e-mail address
Academic Structure: a new system with new terminology
Levels, colleges, schools, and departments, majors, minors and certificates: these are the essential building blocks of OHIO's academic structure.
Careers, groups, organizations, programs and plans: these are the concepts PeopleSoft' uses to define academic structure.
For three days during September, 90 individuals representing a broad cross section of the university helped validate the Rufus Initiative team's approach to translating OHIO's current structure into PeopleSoft's new format.
Several themes emerged from the sessions, including:
- New terminology - Faculty participants urged the Rufus Initiative team to communicate early and often with the wider campus community about the new concepts and categories that PeopleSoft uses to define academic structure.
- Academic certificates - Because some graduate level certificates are not connected to any degree-granting course of study, PeopleSoft will need to allow such certificates to exist as independent entities. Also, OHIO certificates are interdisciplinary, with no single college or unit having sole ownership of a particular certificate. As a result, the team will need to ensure that PeopleSoft is set up to allow multiple owners.
- Transfer and Postsecondary Enrollment credits - PeopleSoft will need to take into account both transfer and Postsecondary Enrollment credits when deciding a student's level, especially for those students who are not freshmen. The team confirmed that data other than overall credit will be available for calculating such attributes as the number of terms on campus, in residence, etc.
- Tracking specific populations and cohorts - PeopleSoft's "student group" feature should allow departments to track specific student cohorts who do not necessarily fall into one of the standard academic groupings.
Related Links - Academic Structure
Related Links - Campus Community
