Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: student information system

  • Universities and SIS “Innovation”

    Several years ago, while I worked at a medium-sized university, there was a very similar incident like what happened in Student Is Sanctioned for Creating Class-Registration Web Site. A student wanted into a full class. So he built an application to routinely check for whether a seat was available in the Student Information System. The database…

  • Confidentiality

    A student wants Blackboard Vista to not reveal his or her last name. The student has already gone to the Registrar and gotten a confidentiality flag placed on the record. As I understand it, this flag in Banner is a FERPA protection to prevent the record from being provided to parties external to the university.…

  • Everything to Everyone

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    This is intended to be a more thoughtful response to Laura regarding Course Management Systems and the need for innovation. Currently, Course Management Systems are bloatware. They got this way by trying to provide everything to everyone. One instructor wants a feature, the university presses for this feature, the CMS programmers put in the feature.…

  • B for a Be

    Are online students really students? We like to think seeing is believing, but who meets a student who takes a completely online class? Apparently, seeing is also interpolating…. at Stanford, anyway. Is this a single case? How easy is it for someone to take an academic year’s worth of classes without anyone catching on to…