Online College boosts efficiency

A team of technology experts in Arts & Sciences is guiding the processes of assigning advisers, auditing academic standing and registering for courses into the purely electronic realm to save money, labor and time.

“Throughout the University, there were offices and pockets of people who retyped and re-entered information on 10,000 students,” said Charles Grisham, chief technology officer. “No one had looked at the process to identify the waste and duplication.”

This reliance on paper is now being replaced by e-mail and Web-based scheduling systems and electronically stored student files. The shift to electronic scheduling for academic advising reduces the annual cost from $28,610 to $5,637 and cuts labor from 1,004 personnel hours to 49.

Students “can sign up [for advising sessions] in their pajamas,” said database analyst Paul Madden. “Our Web forms are available anywhere in the world.”

The College’s academic audit, which informs students of their academic status, went electronic in fall 2000, saving $23,868 and nearly 75 percent of the workload. Electronic course pre-registration saves $17,917, reducing time from 224 hours to 56. Creating electronic files for students, which began this fall, has a projected annual savings of $15,048.

And there’s more to come. “I want the University to run in such a way that when a student types his name and address and particulars on his application, that is the last time he or she ever does it,” Grisham said. “We want the student to be integrated into the electronic system before he even gets here.”