Some UVA faculty members are mad over the implementation of the Student Information System (SIS), a new course enrollment and data management system that many feel is convoluted and attempts to force a corporate framework onto the academy.
“It may very well be an excellent system in other contexts,” says Allan Megill, a UVA history professor. “But it’s very clear that no thought has been given to how this might be adapted to the educational goals of the faculty of Arts and Sciences.”
Designed by PeopleSoft, SIS was approved by UVA for implementation in 1999 as part of its Integrated System Project, on a budget of $58.9 million. Originally a corporate resource management system, SIS classifies students as “employees” and is more difficult to navigate than its predecessor, ISIS Online. Since SIS went live for student enrollment this semester, faculty members in various departments have catalogued numerous bugs in the system.
“I don’t think you can overstate the amount of dismay and inconvenience this is causing faculty as it stands,” says one professor, speaking anonymously. “It may get better. But the system we have now is a disaster.”
In principle, SIS allows students to enroll in classes, set up meetings with their advisors and access financial information and grade reports. For faculty, it allows them to access the class roster, create online waitlists and control enrollment in their courses.
But all of these are easier said than done. With SIS, according to UVA Physics Professor Lou Bloomfield, “to find classes now, you have to work your way in and out of many pages on SIS. You can’t use the Back button, you can’t bookmark pages, and Google can’t index it. It’s so hard to browse for courses on SIS that you almost have to know that a class exists in order to find it,” he said in an e-mail.
UVA Computer Science Professor Mark Sherriff says that “whenever a new system of this magnitude is launched at a large institution, there are bound to be issues.” While Sherriff also has reservations about the system, he says that large software transitions rarely go smoothly. “[The] greatest cost of software development is the maintenance of the system afterwards—almost 67 percent of the overall total cost,” he said in an e-mail. “That’s because even when systems are ‘done’ and the 1.0 version has been shipped, there’s always improvements that need to be done to truly meet the needs of the customers.” Sherriff says he is “confident that the system will improve over the next few semesters.”
Yet other universities have noted problems in their implementations of PeopleSoft products, and in some cases, litigation has resulted. Cleveland State University adopted the PeopleSoft program suite in 1997 to track student records. Seven years later, they sued the company for $510 million, citing breach of contract, fraud, negligent misrepresentation and four other counts, and won a $4.25 million settlement.
Susan Barr, director of UVA’s Student System Project (SSP), acknowledges that there have been issues with SIS handling of course enrollment, but says that the majority of undergraduates have been able to register for classes without incident. According to Barr, department faculty representatives are currently meeting with administrators to discuss SIS, and others who encounter issues can request changes through the SSP website. “My hope is that people will exercise that process,” says Barr. “We’ve tried to be very responsive throughout the whole implementation.” Aspects of SIS have been rolled out in phases since March 2008, although this is the first semester the software has been used broadly for enrollment purposes, as a replacement for ISIS.
“It is a change,” Barr says.
So far, however, faculty members consider it an inconvenience. Caroline Flournoy, a seventh-year Ph.D. student in biology, says that the system’s near-constant cycle of defects and repairs has interfered with her work as a teaching assistant. “Even though according to the Registrar, I am an instructor of record for the classes that I teach, SIS doesn’t recognize that I am,” says Flournoy.
“For a while I didn’t have access to the class roster, and I cannot create an official class website,” she says.
Flournoy still cannot see her students’ e-mail addresses, and links to images of their faces are broken.
“It has really been an impediment to my efficacy as an instructor,” Flournoy says.
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