Prior to summer, Vanderbilt Student Government President Wyatt Smith initiated a plan with the administration to reform the outdated OASIS system. According to Smith, a “new course enrollment management system” will debut in February or March and be available for use next fall.
“We learned in our research that the system has a very limited capacity,” Wyatt said. “It’s serving the entire undergraduate student body and the graduate students, the whole medical school, the whole law school.” However, OASIS is only able to accommodate 250 people at a time, which causes problems, especially throughout the add/drop period.
Of OASIS, Smith said, “It’s clearly unacceptable, it’s an archaic system, we’ve been voicing that to administrators for a while, but they’re taking action on it, they’re putting a lot of resources toward it and they’re going to work with us to get a new replacement through.”
"It seems remarkable that we're using something like Gmail as our email server but something as difficult as OASIS is still being used to register for classes," said senior Jennifer Dennard.
According to Smith, the new system will include the following features available for fall 2010 registration:
Class search
- The search engine will allow students to browse courses based on subject area, subject code and class title
- Information about particular sections including class requirements, description from the course catalog and details about availability
- Color indicators to show whether a class is open for enrollment, closed or in wait list status
- Real time updates with class information
Advanced search
- Students will have the option to search by school, subject area, instructor, type of component, days offered, time range, mode of instruction, class attributes, credit hours and catalog number
Shopping cart
- The shopping cart will allow students to place and save classes before or during the appointment period
- Students will be able to check class status from the shopping cart
- Throughout the appointment period, students will have the ability to enroll in all or certain classes from the shopping cart
Wait listing classes
- It will not be necessary to update wait list status daily because students will remain on wait lists until they are enrolled in the course, moved off by a registrar or remove themselves
“Drop if enroll” functionality
- Students will be allowed to drop a course only if they are enrolled from the wait list of another class
Enrolled classes
- Students will be able to sort classes for which they are enrolled, wait listed or have dropped
- A typical week schedule will show in a graph that students can change to view any combination of enrolled classes, wait listed classes and classes from the shopping cart
- Students will be able to swap an enrolled course for another open class without dropping a section until they are enrolled in the other course
Catalog search
- A digitized and searchable copy of the course catalog will be available with additional information such as other components required for each class, along with the school that offers the course, grading basis and information about the class status in the planner
Planner
- Students will be able to plan courses over their time at Vanderbilt, grouping courses by term to use when meeting with advisers
