Form of contact: Meeting with Coordinators and Senior Staff
Stakeholder: Liz Ross and Jeff Cason
WebRedo Contact: Jamie Northrup
Website: http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/sa
Brief:
Requirements:
- Easier navigation- drop downs
- some interactive features like discussion/blog/wiki
- a ‘discussion’ where students can post, but the postings are only viewed by administrator.
- We currently have on-line application for non-Midd students applying to Schools Abroad. It will be very help for advisors/faculty to be able to submit references electronically as well; currently they can just download a PDF and then send it to us.
- Possibly create a system so that study abroad advisors at other institutions can track students’ applications to see what stage in the process they are in.
- Being able to send emails to batches of students (Midd/NonMidd/Term Abroad would be handy, though we can access this info now with FMP, or Excel sheets for those of us who keep Banner records in Excel
- Ability to upload and maintain forms on the www site
- Option for text-only loading; useful for students abroad in minimal connection environments (e.g. Russia)
- Directory – improvement would be to search the directory/website directly from the homepage rather than having to click on the link to the directory page. Also it’s good that there is a drop-down menu for departments, but “student” would be a choice. And now that it’s been upgraded, the results are shown below (on my screen/browser) the search screen, so you have to scroll to see the results, when really, once I’ve search, that part of the screen could go away.
- Segue: the text formatting is terrible (it reformats however it likes and doesn’t allow you to change the formatting once on the interface). This means that unless you’re typing everything from scratch on Segue, the formatting is screwy. Also, the “son of segue” version, which lacks the quiz function, makes it less useful.
- Event registration: I like the automatic reply that tells you your event has been submitted successfully, and I like the on-line calendar/room availability feature-it saves a lot of back and forth. On-line forms, such as Events Scheduling, is useful and works well.
- Student Worker job posting: VERY easy to use-I wouldn’t change a thing, but there has got to be a way to electronically submit a student payroll authorization form.
- KeySurvey-This seems to be working well, now that we have a departmental account and can steal from one another’s surveys. The inability to run a report by respondent and hide the email (making them cease to be anonymous) can be problematic.
- On-line Pre-departure Tracking Application-This is working well, though if it had the ability for students to upload their own forms, it would be golden (https://web.middlebury.edu/services/sa/predep/admin/ )
- CMS. I especially like the ability to “replace” old documents. It’s recently been proven problematic when we link to a server (on-line application, for example) without the “go” url-and then the server we’ve linked to is off-line. It’s difficult to know what he “go” addresses are and when to use them if we haven’t created them. The other problems I have are the bulleted lists (if you remove a bulleted list, I can never get that final bullet to delete) and the multiple pastings of text (instead of inserting a new paragraph, often it will insert it twice-and you can’t always just go in and delete the second one). Much better in this version than the past is the ability to change the size of an existing table and align pictures/wrap text. It would be nice if the Resource Manager saved resources in either alphabetical or chronological order…some type of searchable order (any order really) would be nice rather than the apparent randomization it uses now.
- Being able to submit grades online (Blackboard has this functionality)