2006 / September 29^th/ The train that Web 2.0 Missed : Part 2 of 3

Previous Reading: The train that Web 2.0 Missed: Part 1 of 3

This portion of my little mini-series is going to describe how students are expected to register at Cal Poly. The aim is to merely expose the blatantly obvious: the process is unnecessarily confusing and complicated.

PASS: Not too shabby

At the beginning of the summer, we were sent an email to check out a new application called PASS. It was intended to help us plan out our schedules, and phase out our decaying POWER system that we previously used to plan and register for our classes. Luckily this system is available to the public, so go ahead and take a few minutes and play around with it: Plan a Student Schedule.

There are a lot of things I like about PASS. Most noticably is that it takes into account features that help students actually plan a schedule. No longer are you forced to find the 50 classes that qualify for our D4 General Education requirement - you can have them listed all at once. The application also presents possible schedules via a thumbnail that represents your blocks of class throughout the week (pictured left) allowing students to see their time-usage at a glance. You can even save and recall schedules!

I really like PASS. There are a couple of shortcomings (for instance, the markup is horrendous, and all javascript actions shoot you to the top of the page since they are linked to #). But overall, it’s a giant step forward from POWER. Except that you can’t use PASS to actually register for classes.

This is where things get screwy.

CPReg: Hello, my name is PeopleSoft. How can I molest you today?

So, now you’ve got your awesome schedule planned out and you’re ready to register. No problem! Just watch this short 8 minute demonstration on how to enter in your classes that you already have planned out in PASS into CPReg. Here’s a good design tip: If it takes you 8 minutes to explain how to perform an action that should be exactly one button (i.e. “Register for these classes” in PASS), you need to re-evaluate your situation.

Let’s not even get into the fact that the movie looks like it was designed by a 5-year old, let’s just look into the absurdity of the system. While this system is called CPReg, it is actually part of PeopleSoft (now Oracle), an application suite that belongs in the stone ages. This “enterprise” solution is nothing but archaic thinking that has the benefit of being deeply entrenched in the market.

Now, remember, you have to use PASS in order to find something called a call number for a class (or Class Nbr as CPReg calls it). Once you find this number, you can then enter these numbers into CPReg. But don’t forget — if you have a lab associated with your class, you must enter its call number into a field called “Related Component 1″ on a separate screen. Oh, and you have to enter these class numbers in one at a time, and allow it to “process” the information.

Are you joking?

CPReg is a disgrace of an application. It is by all means harder to use, slower, and uglier than our previous POWER system. Not to mention it doesn’t allow you to plan a schedule — you actually have to use two different applications and copy id numbers back and forth to register for classes.

Who is responsible?

So, who is responsible for this stupidity? Unfortunately there’s a good chance I know this person (sorry Chris if this was your call, but it was a bad one). But in all seriousness I wonder how campuses can possibly look at applications like this and think they’ll make the students lives easier.

I apologize if this post was a bit unorganized: it was more of a rant of the ridiculousness of these two systems and how they do not talk to each other. My final post in this series will outline how I think class scheduling should function and ways to make it better.

1. 

   VIP1

   September 30^th | #

   Peoplesoft, if not implemented properly can be a royal P.I.T.A. I do Peoplesoft Implementations for a living (just technical installs and upgrades, no development or functional configuration) and it can be hairy implementing even simple things like simple workflows.

   On the backend, Peoplesoft is just a big hairy monster cobbled together with a bunch of stuff just slapped together with a flimsy HTML robe.. :)

   You would be REALLY pissed off if you found out how much those “hard to get” functional consultants were making while they implemented that “state of the art” ERP student admin system.

   Oh and making these two systems talk to each other? that would require another “Integration Broker” thingy, cost half a million dollars prolly, and it will still suck.

   But peoplesoft is good for us peoplesoft consultants. :)

2. 

   Rea

   October 2^nd | #

   Wow, that’s pretty annoying. And I complained about how I had to register for classes!

3. 

   Lawrence Salberg

   October 11^th | #

   Holy cow… I have been thinking the EXACT thing you have been writing about. With RoR so popular, how hard could it be to write a better class registration app? At UCF, it is an abomination.

   For instance, I need to register another class this spring on Fridays (to make use of an otherwise wasted trip to campus for only a 50 minute lab). So, I try to search for all classes on Fridays…. No, that brings up every class that has any kind of Friday meeting, including classes that are scheduled on Mon, Wed, etc… which won’t work for me this Spring because I’m doing Tues/Thurs…

   So, I have to run a search on every class that is not on Sun/Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu/Sat. Needless to say, their server times out every time… it probably pulls every class and then tries to filter it on the webserver, rather than a direct db call. And the timeout is five minutes, not 30 seconds, so this is a stretch.

   Worst of all, I have to then sort through all the available options (if I ever could get a result) and look for classes of interest. Now my college knows my degree, so why can’t I get an option just to search for open classes that I haven’t yet taken or registered for? Who knows? Because the administration doesn’t think beyond tuition, I guess.

   I would love to see someone develop an app (maybe me if I get angry enough - ha ha) that trumps this, and then through some sort of cron job, could yank the various school’s data around the country. While you couldn’t register via this app, it would be so embarrasingly simple, that you could use the app to extort these schools to upgrade their registration systems to something a little less dBase III.

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