Technology Advisory Group

The major update to the my.scranton portal (run on Luminis software) that we’ve been talking about for a while is now scheduled for spring break (March/April 2013), which is coming up fast. Thanks to IR, TAG has gotten to provide faculty input on the new portal design (and especially on the Faculty tab) over the past few months. Here’s an update on where we are.

Back in November/December, I gathered some informal feedback from a dozen faculty members on the existing my.scranton portal. Joe Casabona (IT) and Ileana Szymanski (Philosophy) helped me sort through the responses, which I’ll roughly summarize here —

Overall faculty responses to existing my.scranton portal:

• I don’t use 3/4 of this stuff
• I don’t even know what 1/2 of this stuff is
• It takes too long to get to the stuff I need
• I usually just search the website
• Oh, I didn’t know that was there!

Most important/most frequently used items in the existing portal:

1. Angel
2. Email
3. UIS – Faculty Services
4. Course schedule
5. Directories

Also frequently used, but not as universal as the above items:

6. Classroom Reservation Form
7. Academic Calendar
8. University Calendar
9. Course Catalogs
10. Royal Drive
11. Travel
12. OIT Equipment Request
13. Check Vouchers
14. Personal Announcements
15. Faculty Scholarly Achievements
16. Compressed Schedule
17. Course Evaluations

Things that are helpful, but don’t necessarily need to be on the Faculty Tab:

• Bboard
• Pay stubs
• KBOX notifications
• Events submission
• CTLE events and registration
• Tax forms
• Library
• Strategic Plan
• Aquinas

Joe, Ileana, and I also discussed some overarching questions – most importantly, what is Faculty Tab for? Is it a portal to any faculty-related web content, to password-protected content only, or possibly to a personalized set of web content? Unfortunately, I didn’t get to spend time turning this feedback into a mockup of a Faculty Tab, so with major apologies to Joe and Ileana for dropping that ball… fast forward to March 2013.

The new portal is currently in test mode, with the official launch still planned for spring break. The good news is that there are some new features available – like dynamic integration with Banner. The bad news is that some of the new features we expected to be available – like personal tabs and group tabs – won’t actually be available until the next Luminis release (5.1). The other bad news is that Luminis can interact well with Banner but not with Angel, so it’s not really possible to pull dynamic information from Angel courses. The last bit of bad news is that Luminis and UIS (Self-Service) are two separate things, so although several faculty members reported usability issues with UIS (especially term selection), the Luminis upgrade will not include any updates to the Faculty Services UIS tab.

With all that said, here’s a glimpse of what the current draft of the Faculty Tab looks like in test (my dashboard and schedule are empty since I’m not teaching any courses) –

In this morning’s TAG meeting, we talked a little about some possible changes to improve the Faculty Tab – e.g., adding a “Report a Problem” box with an email form for the Technology Support Center. We’d like to hear any additional faculty feedback — whether it’s something that can be changed quickly before the launch or whether it’s something we’ll need to work on for the future. Please let Joe or me know (or comment below) if you have suggestions – and if you’re willing to volunteer to test out the faculty functions, let us know and we’ll see if we can set up a test account for you.

One area that I think we can improve relatively easily is Academic Links — what content is most useful there, and how should it be organized? Let us know what you’d like to see – I took a stab at assembling and grouping the most-used links from the existing my.scranton Faculty tab to get us started:

Teaching

• Angel
• Class Lists
• Grades
• Course Evaluations
• Classroom Request Form
• OIT Equipment Request
• Software Request

Students

• Student Information
• Writing Center Referral
• Testing Accommodations
• Academic Difficulties
• Math Placement Scores

Advising

• Advisee Listing
• Student Information
• Course Catalog

Schedules and Calendars

• Course Schedule
• Compressed Schedule
• Academic Calendar
• Final Exam Schedule

Research

• Scholarly Achievements
• Research Interests
• Travel Application