Despite technological issues involving the Integrated Student Information System (iSIS), the project team is satisfied with the new system's functionality and was prepared for problems that arose once class enrollment opened.
During the first week of school, students reported issues with iSIS regarding class locations and financial aid processing, according to Tufts Technology Services Director of Communications and Organizational Effectiveness Dawn Irish. Some students who had recently submitted tuition payments were locked out of iSIS completely.
"We did expect we'd see some issues here and there," Irish said. "Many of the things we implemented we couldn't test until we went live - until a student actually tried to log in and do something."
According to Irish, the team addressed problems as quickly as possible.
"I don't think there was anything that came up that was too tragic," she said. "There wasn't anything that we couldn't resolve pretty quickly. We didn't know what problems there were going to be. Otherwise they wouldn't have happened in the first place. But things do happen, and it was relatively smooth."
In the time it took for iSIS administrators to respond, however, some students faced problems with scheduling courses.
"My major problem had to do with my registration for mandatory recitations for my language class," sophomore Michele De Mars said. "Essentially all the recitations were filled, so I couldn't register for my lecture class even though the lecture was still open. It waitlisted you for both."
Students have also cited complaints that the iSIS interface is confusing to navigate.
"iSIS is a lot more complicated than at my old school. You can't click back, which was really frustrating," Laura Andreola, a junior transfer student, said. "Sometimes when I'd log in, I'd have error signs all over my screen, and I had to delete my browser history in order to address that problem."
Enrollment issues with recitations were due to quotas that individual departments had set, not the system, Irish explained. She added that students should clear their browser's caches and cookies, as well as use the iSIS navigation icons - rather than the browser's back button - when navigating the system.
Irish stressed that the implementation period of iSIS is not over, as the project has entered a one-year "stabilization period" during which improvements will be made. The next step may include a one-time login for Trunk and iSIS, she said.
"We appreciate students' patience as we address all of these issues," Irish said. "We're really just excited. It's new technology. We haven't implemented a new system in almost 30 years."
One of the primary goals of the iSIS project was to streamline all the data and information from Student Information System (SIS), the former student information system that iSIS replaced last spring.
"We had integrated a lot of newer systems over the years, like the financial aid and learning management systems," Irish said. "And all of those things existed, but they were on aging infrastructure, and they didn't talk to each other. You had to log into 18 different systems, and you had a different username and password for many of them."
Although Andreola appreciates that the changes have made different school sites more accessible, she believes that the streamlining process has created a system too complex for easy use.
"At [Vanderbilt University], we had different sites for everything - financial aid was in a different place than registration - but each site operated well," Andreola said. "I think the idea of having it all in one place is really cool, but it is too complicated."
On the other hand, Irish emphasized the importance of a consolidated system like iSIS for students pursuing an interdisciplinary education. The original system inhibited this type of experience, she said.
"If you were a student in one place and you wanted to take a course at the other, it was complicated and messy," she said. "This brought all of that data together so that we could really expand on cross-disciplinary learning."
