Office of the University Registrar

Beginning tomorrow, July 1, the University’s official transcript fee increases from $4 to $9.  The increase was approved by the UW Board of Regents at its June 11 meeting.

While no one—the students who pay the fee nor the Office of the Registrar—likes a fee increase, some facts about the increase (the first since 1994) are worth noting. We hope they will help soften the blow of the additional cost for transcripts. And students shouldn’t overlook the easy availability of free, unofficial transcripts: just a click or two away through MyUW.

In percentage terms, the transcript fee increase is large: 125%. But given some context, it’s clear that the fee isn’t an undue burden on students. The fee was last increased in 1994 when it was raised from $3 to $4, which is what it had been since 1980. That’s only two increases in nearly 30 years!

Historical information is interesting, but it doesn’t change the fact that current students will pay the higher cost. So it is also important to note that UW’s new fee is still in line with that charged at many other universities:

• $8 at Kansas State University
• $8 at University of Southern California
• $10 at University of Texas at Austin
• $12 at University of Chicago
• $15 at Arizona State University
• $15 at University of California at Berkley
• $20 at University of Colorado

A few items worth noting about Kuali Student, the community-sourced student data management system that the UW is a founding member of.

• Another founding-member school – The Naval Postgraduate School, along with San Joaquin Delta College, have joined the Kuali Student project. They will share the responsibilities and authority as a founding member.
• UW staffer profiled – Alexis Raphael, a Senior Communications Specialist for the Office of Information Management, was profiled as a featured Kuali Student contributor.
• UW to host Kuali conference – July 13-17 the UW campus will host the Kuali Student “R1 Setup” conference.

More information on these items and others can be found on this post at the Kuali Student blog.

UW students with iPhones or other mobile devices can now search for available classes, locate them on campus, and catch up on the latest University news from a single interface. This functionality is now available thanks to the initiative of a group of Informatics students and the flexibility and availability of the Student Web Services (SWS).

Home screen for Mobile MyUW

Mobile MyUW, as the experimental web application is named, is not an official version of the University’s MyUW information portal. It’s the final project for Informatics 344, “Web Tools and Development,” created by undergraduate students Braxton Ehle, Chris Zrout, and William Briere. Their project was to create a mobile-optimized version of MyUW functionality (it’s best viewed in a mobile browser) and they turned to the Office of Information Management (OIM) to leverage the SWS.

“We were happy to see such fast and creative innovation built on top of the SWS,” OIM’s Tony Chang wrote on the Resource Oriented Archicture blog, On the ROA. This sort of experimentation with public data is one of the primary reasons the University is investing in web services.

The web application requires a log-in (managed by the web application itself; it does not authenticate users via UW NetID), and offers users three main features:

1. Classes – Search for classes to add to your schedule (leverages the “course” web service).
2. Class location – Pinpoint your classes on a Google Map of campus, including a handy “Find today’s classes” link showing you where need to be throughout the day.
3. UW News – The latest headlines from the UW’s RSS news feed.

According to Chang, the three students plan to continue to refine the proof-of-concept web application and add features. It’s exciting to see useful applications for the UW community so soon after the release of the SWS. It’s especially interesting to see the “mashup” of data services: SWS and the Google Maps API.

The web application earned the group respect among the UW developer community—as well as a good grade.

Finding out which students are registered for a particular class section just got a lot easier.

Earlier this month, the “Class List by Section” report was deployed in the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), the new campus-wide data reporting service. It’s the first of several reports being created to replace the aging “deptinfo” system that provides administrators access to class lists, enrolled students, and other departmental information. Users with access to deptinfo will be granted access to the new report automatically in the coming weeks.

The new EDW report offers a number of improvements over the similar report available through deptinfo:

• Interactivity – Information in EDW reports is web-based and can be easily sorted or filtered within the web browser to provide the best view of the data for the user’s needs.
• Additional information – The Class List by Section report also includes students’ minors, information requested by many department admins but not available in the deptinfo report.
• Immediacy - Departmental admins can view class lists immediately in their web browser. Under deptinfo, user requests arrived by e-mail 10- to 15 minutes after being requested.
• Output flexibility – The report can be exported in a variety of formats, including PDFs for output or into Excel or CSV files for further analysis.

Other improvements are planned for updated versions of this report, including class lists by entire course, not just a specific section. Future reports replacing other deptinfo functionality include lists of students who’ve applied for graduation in a given quarter, and generating contact info for all students in a department to simplify invitations to department functions. A deployment timeline for all EDW reports (including those in human resources, research, and finance) is available at the Office of Information Management’s (OIM) Enterprise Reporting Initiative website.

The Class List by Section report was jointly developed by the Registrar’s Academic Data Management Office and OIM.

This post is another update to a previous entry, available here: Faculty: Spring into web grading this quarter.

It’s the day after grades were due for Spring quarter and the verdict is in: web grading is a hit! It’s amazing how quickly faculty embraced this new process, which indicates its usefulness for everyone involved in the grading process.

Spring quarter grades by submission type: Over 50% submitted by web grading!

Just over half—51%—of grades for the quarter came in through Web GradeBook. That’s an impressive statistic considering this is the first quarter for which online submission has been widely available (a “soft rollout” was available Winter 09, but not heavily advertised). We look forward to this number increasing over the next few quarters as more faculty discover the convenience—and benefit to students—of web grading.

The Office of the University Registrar thanks all those faculty who submitted their grades via web grading, and to Catalyst, the Office of Information Management, UW Technology, and everyone else who helped bring this project to fruition.

Today—Monday, June 15—is the deadline for grade submission for Spring quarter. Please make sure all grades are submitted by one of the following times:

• 10 a.m. for grades submitted by paper-based Faculty Grade Reports (more info)
• 5 p.m. for grades submitted by Web GradeBook (more info)

Remember, students count on timely submission of grades for financial aid, acknowledgement of scholastic achievement, and other reasons. However, if you do miss the deadline, please read follow the instructions for paper-based grading or web-based grading.

Today, June 12, is the last day of Spring quarter, 2009. For many hundreds of students, it also marks the successful completion of their studies at our University. To them, the Office of the University Registrar offers its most heartfelt congratulations on their achievement.

The University of Washington’s 134th Commencement Ceremony is upon us! Students at the Tacoma campus take part in their commencement ceremony today; those at the Bothell campus do so on Sunday. On Saturday, the Seattle campus will be thronged by graduates in their gowns, faculty in academic regalia, distinguished speakers, and thousands upon thousands of proud family members come to watch their loved ones mark this important milestone in their academic careers.

It will be a busy weekend for the greater UW community. Again, the OUR extends its congratulations and wishes everyone—graduates, their families, UW faculty and staff, and those who make such events possible—a safe and joyous celebration.

This post is an update to a previous entry, available here: Faculty: Spring into web grading this quarter.

Graph of web grading submissions for SPR09.

Many faculty are taking advantage of Web Grading’s convenience to submit grades early. In fact, four times as many faculty—65% of whom are new to Web Grading this quarter—have submitted spring quarter grades over the web than they did for the same period in winter quarter! And those faculty have submitted six times as many grades as this time in winter quarter: over 1,900 so far. By comparison, no grades would have been available on the 11^th day of the grading period prior to web grading’s launch last quarter.

Although final grades for most University courses will not be available until finals week, the successful early adoption of Web Grading by faculty whose classes are able to be graded at this time is a good leading indicator for the rest of the quarter.

What does this early adoption mean for students? Most importantly, it offers peace of mind to those who know their grades more than a week before they would under paper-based grading. For instance: They know their financial aid won’t be jeopardized by late grades. It also provides a student ample time to discuss a grade with the instructor before either leaves for break.

The Office of the University Registrar again thanks OIM, UW Technology, Catalyst, and all of our collaborators for creating the Web Grading system.  It gives convenience and the gift of precious time to hundreds (soon thousands) of  our faculty.  For tens of thousands of students, it ensures peace of mind and the timely granting of financial aid, honors, course prerequisites, and a long list of other benefits.

Registrar Todd Mildon recently encouraged faculty to submit Spring quarter 2009 grades via Catalyst’s Web GradeBook. That message is reposted below.

I am writing to encourage you to submit spring quarter grades online to Graduations and Academic Records through the Catalyst GradeBook tool.

The online grading service is open and available now through June 15.  I hope that it will save you a significant amount of time, and that it will eliminate the delays and frustration associated with our old paper grading process.  In addition to the anticipated gains for faculty, I know that students will benefit from the online system’s speed and efficiency when final grades arrive sooner than was reasonably possible in the past.

Thanks to a partnership between my office [The Office of the University Registrar], the Office of Information Management, and UW Technology, we first offered online submission at the end
of winter quarter.   Almost 49 percent of all winter grades submitted on time came in online.  More importantly, we learned a great deal from this first experience with online submission and have worked since then to make it even easier.

The current spring grading period opened May 26th at 8:00 a.m. and closes June 15th at 5:00 p.m.  Please note that after this deadline, grades cannot be submitted online.  Please note also that you can submit grades via Catalyst GradeBook even if you have not used it to track grades throughout the quarter.

For instructions on how to get started with online grade submission, please visit this page:

http://catalyst.washington.edu/help/gradebook/about_online.html

FAQs about online grade submission are answered on the Registrar’s Web site:

http://registrar.washington.edu/staffFaculty/webgradingFAQ.php

If you need assistance with GradeBook, please send an e-mail to catalysthelp@u.washington.edu.  For questions about the University’s grading system or other grade-related questions, please contact the Graduation and Academic Records office at ugradoff@u.washington.edu, or 206-543-1803.