Self-Service causes headaches for students

ASU's Self-Service went live in 2006 and being fairly new, this online way of registering for classes still confuses some students.

Concerns encountered by students include incidents of accidently signing up for an online class or ending up in a course on another campus.

"I end up signing up for classes on the wrong campus every semester," said Paige Hannahs, a senior photojournalism major from Bryant.

It's happened every semester, even when they registered for me at [freshmen] orientation,"

I think the Jonesboro campus should be the default."

Some students are confused by how online classes are designated.

The label TBA, or to be announced, is the default for the time and place designation for online classes, since they don't have a set time or physical meeting place.

Students have signed up for a class that was to be announced, believing that the class meeting time and place hadn't been decided yet, and later discovered that they enrolled in an online course.

Beverly Weems, communication and training coordinator in the Office of the Registrar, explained why students have these problems and offered advice for navigating the system.

She said, right now, there is not a way to fix the default TBA for online classes, but you can see if a class is online by checking the instructional method when you click on the blue course number.

The instructional method will say Web if the class is offered online.

Weems also said a lot of problems are caused because students don't know that they can select multiple categories by first clicking on one option, holding down the shift key and then selecting an option further down on the list.

Through this kind of grouping, every category between the one a student first clicked on and the last one he or she clicked on will be highlighted in blue and added to the search criteria.

In addition, many students don't utilize the category options available when searching for classes on Self-Service and most don't seek out the information available through links in Self-Service.

"Be conscious of your selection. Read material about a course," she said. "Anything in blue indicate more information, click it and explore it."

The purpose of Self-Service, Weems said, was to promote self-use for students and eliminate students standing in line waiting on someone to register for them and going through an automated system via telephone to register.

"We wanted the students to be able to do this independently at their convenience," she said. "Anything they need is in their Self-Service account."

Self-Service is part of the banner system that is a software package.

There are two sides to banner.

One side is what students use, the other side is what different campus offices use to get student information they need to perform specific tasks.

There is an informational how-to document available to students, but Weems said the Office of the Registrar doesn't print anything and this information packet is available on request via e-mail. If a student is struggling with using Self-Service, they can e-mail the registrar at registrar@astate.edu to receive this guide on using Self-Service.

The Student Government Association is getting involved with the banner system.

SGA senators have been conducting surveys, garnering support to streamline the logging in process for Self-Service, student e-mail accounts and BlackBoard accounts.

Currently, when students log into In.AState, they are immediately logged into Self-Service but have to enter the same log-in information two separate times to access their student e-mail or BlackBoard accounts.

Somer Allen, SGA public relations coordinator, said the SGA wants to eliminate these separate log-ins and make In.AState a central location from campus communications.

Students have responded positively that this is something they want.

She also said SGA has been working with Information Technology Services to accomplish this goal.

"ITS has been very helpful to SGA in response to this student request," she said.

This issue will be brought up at SGA's 'What You Want Wednesday' from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Wednesday.

As of Friday, surveys had been conducted through senators going to their respective constituents.

Allen hopes to reach a more extensive group of survey participants Wednesday.