While students were away for summer, Information Technology Services has been working to optimize the current systems already in place. The Manhattan College community can look forward to updates for MyMCPortal and DegreeWorks and two new initiatives ITS plans to roll out.
The team has done a lot of work to make the MyMCPortal a more convenient resource for mobile devices.
“The college website was updated, six months, maybe a year ago, to the so-called responsive design so it looks nice not only on a laptop but a phone and a tablet,” Jake Holmquist, the director of Internet Technology Services, said. “It changes sizes nice and dynamically. We’ve done that for the MC Portal as well,”
“Things that would normally take seven clicks right now we’re trying to make one click away,” Holmquist said of how the team is trying to streamline the portal.
The DegreeWorks system that helps students and advisors track a student’s path to an on-time graduation was also upgraded with a new planning tool called the Student Educational Planner.
“It’s a tool for the academic advisors to much more easily plan ahead, one two three, four, five semesters ahead to much more easily map out your path to graduation,” Holmquist said.
“This makes it [the planning] much more electronic and streamlined.”
The college can look forward to the introduction of Workflow, a program that helps remove the hassles of paperwork.
Students, professors, and faculty will no longer need to walk around campus to get multiple signatures for one form as most forms will be available to be filled out completely electronically.
“So, those paper chase forms you need to fill out will slowly but surely go away,” Holmquist said.
Students are looking forward to this new system.
“It seems that this new system makes things much easier.” freshman Sam Corby said. “There’s no reason to do it the old way. It shouldn’t be so complicated. It can just work electronically.”
Other students agree.
“I think that will definitely be much more efficient,” said senior Tiffany Santiago. “With people around here, you don’t know their office hours and when you do, they’re not a hundred percent there when they say they are so that’s definitely going to speed up the process.”
Another system that will be launching soon is called OneWeb. It will allow students or parents to go online from home and add value to their campus card account with a credit card.
“This was targeted to launch before school staring, but we have one hold-up with the credit card processing vendor,” Holmquist said.
“They’re taking a little bit longer than we would have liked to deliver the backend to the credit card processing. […] October 1 is our official launch,” he said.