Students can now export their class schedules and the university's academic calendar from Tufts' WebCenter to popular software like Microsoft Outlook, iCal, Palm Desktop and Google Calendar.
The new service, called "My Course Schedule Download," was announced yesterday and lets students export information on the dates, times and locations of their classes directly to their electronic calendars, PDAs or smartphones.
It can also transfer university-wide drop dates, registration periods, vacations and other important dates from the Tufts academic calendar.
Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senator Woon Young Jeong, a sophomore who was instrumental in creating the service, said he hopes that it will be useful for students.
"I hope it will be a convenient tool for the student body to help them plan their semester better," he said.
After hearing complaints from his friends about having to manually input schedules, Jeong brought the idea to the Senate's Education Committee in September. TCU Senate Historian sophomore Neil DiBiase agreed that the new service will help students. "In terms of time saving, it's a huge impact to be able to hit one button and have your entire schedule downloaded," he said.
Uploading dates from WebCenter adds to previously existing setups without requiring students to scrap dates already on their calendars.
Furthermore, students can opt to upload either their personal course schedules or just the academic calendar, so those who have manually entered their classes before the new WebCenter feature became operational can add the university's important dates without their course schedules.
Tutorials with screenshots and instructions also appear on WebCenter to help students integrate the files they download with the scheduling programs.
In developing the service, Jeong worked closely with Director of Student Information Systems Technology Patricia Sheehan and programmer and analyst Mario Gonzalez.
"At first I thought it would be ideal for it to go on SIS because that's where all the course registration is done," Jeong said. After speaking with Sheehan and Gonzalez, however, he discovered that WebCenter is a better fit.
"[SIS] is a program [Tufts] bought, not something they produced, so they can't really play around with it much," he said.
WebCenter, on the other hand, was created and is currently maintained by Information Technology Services (ITS).
Tufts freshman Natalie Polito said that the addition of the new service makes sense. "Tufts is keeping up with the technological pace of our generation," Polito said.
"It seems like they have hired a lot of young professors, so more and more teachers would be likely to use this. It just keeps with the general trend of the university," she said.
On the other hand, sophomore Aaron Marden said that the program, although intriguing, is too unimportant and specific for Tufts students to actually utilize it.
"I think it is interesting, but I think it is kind of a tedious thing," Marden said. "I don't think most people are going to use it because the general Tufts population doesn't seem to react to new little programs like this."
