Registrar implements Schedule Planner

Southeast Missouri State University has launched a new Schedule Planner tool for students to schedule their classes before registering.

Registrar Sandy Hinkle said the new program was adopted by the university because students were on their own scheduling classes beforehand. Hinkle said the Office of the Registrar's goal is always to make students' lives easier, and adding this program was a way to do that.

"We always try to do what is best for our students," Hinkle said. "And, I'll be honest, we have a student worker up here and one day I came in and she had all these papers surrounding her with all these class times. I asked her what she was doing, she told me and I said, 'What if we had a product that could do that for you?'"

Students can access the Schedule Planner in the Student SS tab of the Southeast Portal under Registration Tools. Once there, students select the term, campus and length of class. Next, students can select the courses they want to take, with the option of choosing which sections of the class they are interested in. All possible schedules based on your selections will be shown once students generate schedules.

"If you choose five courses, it can come up with an unlimited number of possibilities based on what you say," Hinkle said. "It can do any number of possibilities, and then you get to pick and choose."

Hinkle added that students are able to put breaks into the schedule for when students can't be in class. She said this tool can be used by students if they have prior commitments, or just know they can't properly function during an early class.

The Schedule Planner also includes the option of seeing the various schedules side by side, and see the course descriptions and prerequisites.

"You still meet with your adviser, the adviser never goes out of the process," Hinkle said. "So you meet with your adviser, you find those courses that you need to take for the next semester and then you plug it into the planner to help you find this time schedule that works for you."

The system also allows students to save their schedule into a shopping cart, and when students are able to register, they can do it through Schedule Planner. Hinkle advises students to look through the planner before their preferred registration date.

"Fall registration doesn't open until April 4, but you can go ahead and do all of this now," Hinkle said. "You can drop your preferred schedule into your shopping cart, it saves it and then the day of registration all you do is go in and hit the shopping cart to plug it into your registration. Hit the buttons and it's all there. You don't have to add CRNs."

Hinkle and her staff had been looking at adding a system like this for a while.

"You go to conferences and you see this thing that can develop all these schedules and it sounds too good to be true," Hinkle said. "We've kind of been investigating over the last couple of years and really started digging into it over the last year or so."

Hinkle said to obtain the program, Southeast had to go through a bidding process.

"We had to write up all of the specifications for the program, what do we want it to do, and one thing that we did put was adding in the breaks and being able to save things you've already done," Hinkle said. "We wanted it to generate every possible schedule, we want you to have that many options. So the bid that we wrote was pretty specific on what we wanted. We went in knowing that there's only a couple of products out there that could really provide what we wanted."

Only two companies responded to the bid, but one of them was thrown out because it could not generate every possible schedule available. Hinkle said the chosen program was then slowly introduced on campus, with a soft opening occurring in January. She said the opening went well and they are not expecting any issues as fall registration comes.

Hinkle said this new program is not just beneficial for students, but also for departments to receive reports on what classes students are interested in taking.

The Office of the Registrar also is working on making reports off of Degreeworks and class waiting lists that would help departments in similar ways.