SOAR Newsletter, March 2005
Filed under Registrar/AARC
Posted by Registrar, March 02, 2005
View all posts for March 2005
Greetings and salutations from Dennis Scimeca, Manager of On-Line Services in the Registrar’s Office!
In the last SOAR Newsletter, a questionnaire was posted on student usage of the SOAR system during registration for the Spring 2005 semester. Now that Summer and then Fall registration dates are approaching, I would like to share the two conclusions we were able to draw from this research.
- It is clearly to the student’s advantage to use Express Registration with Course Synonyms. Students who did so were able to register slightly faster than those who used the Express Registration without Synonyms method. One-third of students using the synonyms registered in under 5 minutes, versus one-fifth of students who did not use course synonyms.
- A clear majority of all Simmons students registering for Spring 2005 courses on SOAR, 80% of them, took under 30 minutes to register for their courses. 64% of all students registered in under 15 minutes. Therefore, if you have difficulty logging in to SOAR on your first try, your best bet is to wait 15-30 minutes before trying again rather than trying immediate, repeated attempts. This will allow SOAR to better process the operations of users currently logged in, making their transactions move faster and smoother and enabling them to log off quicker, which in turn makes room for new users to log in at a more rapid pace. Continuing to attempt to immediately log in when traffic is high slows down the entire system.
Using Express Registration with Synonyms and leaving more time between log in attempts when the system is busy will allow the SOAR system to process more users more quickly, resulting in a better SOAR experience for all Simmons students.
Also, it appears that some students do not log off SOAR following registration. SOAR will eventually terminate your session after 15 minutes of inactivity, but it is important to always log off SOAR immediately when you are done with your session. This is not only important for your own security, but is doubly-important during registration periods when the number of users attempting to use the SOAR system is high. Not logging off SOAR immediately when your session is completed effectively prevents another person from logging into the system.
Summer 2005 Registration Dates
College of Arts and Sciences students will be able to register for Summer 2005 courses beginning Monday, March 14 at 10:00 a.m., and ending Friday, March 25th at 5:00 p.m..
School of Management students will be able to register for Summer 2005 courses beginning Thursday, March 3 at 9:00 a.m. and ending Friday, March 18 at 5:00 p.m.
The School of Social Work, School for Health Studies, and Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences will internally-distribute their Summer registration dates and times.
New Additions to SOAR
Faculty members can now send mass emails to all students on a course roster, much in the same way advisers can send mass emails to advisee lists. This new function is found on the course roster screen, above the instructor’s name. Simply click on the link which reads “Email to the entire Class List” and an email to all students on that roster will be created in a new window through your default email client.
Please note that the email addresses of your students will appear in the “Bcc:” field, not the “To” field. This is both to insure the privacy of your students and to prevent them from accidentally sending an emailed “reply” to your entire list of students. Placing your own email address in the “To:” field can be useful in maintaining copies of emails sent to students through the course roster screen.
Consent and Blocking Email Addresses
As registration for Summer and Fall courses is rapidly approaching, a reminder about how we use the consent and blocking email addresses in the Registrar’s Office.
When consent is emailed to the Registrar’s Office, consent is being granted not to allow students to register for consent courses themselves, but for our office to register the students in said courses. Therefore, when emailing consent@simmons.edu, please specify any and all section numbers for which students should be registered.
Due to the vastly-increased volume of email we received to this address, it was decided that any email involving advisor holds on student registration should no longer go to the consent email address, but should have its own address. Therefore, the new email address blocking@simmons.edu has been established. Please direct any and all email involving registration holds on student accounts, or lifting of registration holds, to this address.
NEW SOAR PASSWORD SYSTEM
As of October 8, 2004, in order to make remembering passwords easier your password for SOAR is exactly the same as your password for Simmons email, E-Learning/WebCT, personal web pages, or secure web pages on the Simmons website. Simply log in to SOAR using the same username and password as any of these other web services.
If you have any questions about Simmons’s password systems, including how to change your password or how to retrieve your password if you have forgotten it, you may follow the appropriate links in the “User Account” menu in SOAR for Students or SOAR for Faculty, or may go straight to this webpage:
http://my.simmons.edu/services/technology/helpdesk/username-password.shtml
SOAR Instruction
One of my highest priorities is to make sure that every Simmons student and faculty and staff member is able to achieve a high level of comfort with the SOAR system.
To that end, I am always more than happy to give one-on-one instruction or review on the use of SOAR here in the Registrar’s Office. If I receive enough requests to warrant a large tutorial meeting I will certainly schedule one, but we have a station with three flat-screen and printer-equipped computers in the Registrar’s Office at which I would be pleased to walk students or instructors through any questions on SOAR they may come across.
Please contact me if this is something you would like to take advantage of, as I always enjoy meeting new students, faculty, and staff here at Simmons.
