Office of the University Registrar

Until now, students whose hard work throughout the quarter earned them a spot on the Dean’s List have been notified by mail. Their academic achievements will continue to be recognized with a letter, but the delivery method has changed. Beginning summer quarter 09, Dean’s List letters are delivered by e-mail, not by postal mail. Students receive a letter containing a link to a secure website (more on that below) where the letters can be viewed or saved in PDF format, so they can easily be printed if desired.

Why the change?

There are a few reasons for transitioning from physical to electronic letters. Financial responsibility is certainly one of them. The cost of paper, envelopes, printing and postage for the thousands of letters mailed each quarter adds up. Even in summer, the quarter with the least enrollment, there are typically about 1,200 to 1,500 Dean’s List students; that number can reach 8,000 or even 10,000 in autumn quarters. With each letter costing about 50 cents in postage and materials alone, going electronic saves a lot of money. Although sharing good news with our students and their families is a good reason to spend funds, in these tight fiscal times it’s prudent to save money wherever possible.

Also, today’s students are increasingly accustomed to electronic versions of documents: online bill payments and banking; e-mailed receipts for both online and in-store purchases; even some medical records have moved to the web. In this environment it makes sense to deliver notification of academic scholarship online, too. It’s worth noting that students who made the dean’s list—and whose information-release status permit it—are posted on the University’s website as well.

What about information security?

We’ve taken great care to ensure that this new process meets FERPA guidelines for protecting student data. The notification message, which is e-mailed to the student’s official UW-provided e-mail address, contains only a generic introduction, the student’s name, and a customized link. When following that link, the student must prove their identity by authenticating with their UW NetID before their letter is displayed.

The UW Bookstore’s popular annual feature, the customer rebate, just got easier to collect. Keeping receipts in an envelope all year is a thing of the past; now it’s as simple as swiping your UW ID card when you make a purchase.

It’s a win-win situation for the Bookstore and its customers. The Bookstore no longer has to collect, sort, and total customer receipts at the end of each fiscal year (June 30). Nor does it have to verify each student’s enrollment status. These tasks, being paper-based, required much time and effort. Customers benefit from no longer having to keep track of their receipts all year or submit them in person to the Bookstore.

The Office of the University Registrar (OUR) played a role in this process improvement, which launched at the beginning of July. The Bookstore had approached the OUR with an idea to automate the verification of a students’ enrollment status. Soon afterward, the OUR had developed, tested, and deployed a process that enabled the change. It’s always a pleasure to see this sort of collaboration between University groups result in significant improvement for all stakeholders.

More information on the UW Bookstore’s customer rebate.

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 month’s edition of Highlights, the newsletter published by the Office of Information Management (OIM), recaps a number of important projects going on in that office. Many of these projects span multiple departments, including the Office of the University Registrar, UW Technology, UW Marketing, and others.

You can read the newsletter at OIM’s site, and then refer to the following list of posts on this blog that cover many of the projects in more detail. Each post is grouped by the section of Highlights in which the project is mentioned.

Information for Decision Making

• “The University Student Database (UWSDB) is now securely and widely available” – Access to student data now faster and more secure
• “A new blog for resource oriented architecture keeps developers informed” – Another web services milestone

Replace the Base

• “Kuali Student continues” – Keep up with Kuali

Enhance and Renew Systems

• “Photo class lists now available on MyUW” – Photo Class List service appears on front page of The Daily and Smile, You’re on Photo Class List
• “Administrators can now see student academic records on the Web” – Administrative staff can now be all EARS

Redesign Process

• “Web Grade Submission launch exceeds usage expectations” – Web GradeBook taking off