For the first time since WebAdvisor was introduced, Hillsdale College students have a second way to pre-register for classes.
With the Ellucian Go campus mobile app, some students said they registered with their smartphones in hopes of avoiding the traffic volumes that flood WebAdvisor at 7 a.m. on registration days. Since it uses the same system as WebAdvisor, however, information technology services Systems Analyst Chris Miller said the convenience of the app doesn’t speed up registration.
Senior Therese Burgess used the app to register Monday morning at 7 a.m., when senior pre-registration opened. She ultimately had to complete her registration on her computer, however, because the app stalled.
“I had the app as backup,” Burgess said. “I had WebAdvisor up on my computer, but I know it always crashes…but then the app wouldn’t even load, so I was just staring at the little ‘spinning wheel of death’ for a long time on my phone.”
But the app worked perfectly for junior Brendan Clarey, who woke up 50 minutes late.
“I put my classes in the night before, woke up, hit the line of check marks, and hit register, and it worked,” Clarey said. “It was quick too, there weren’t any ‘spinning pinwheels of death.’”
Technology services company Ellucian made Colleague, a software that manages most of Hillsdale’s database information, including grades and paychecks. It also designed the app Ellucian Go.
The app’s registration feature makes registering for classes easier and more accessible but not necessarily faster than on the computer, Miller said.
“They’re both hitting that same system,” he said. “Registration happens through Colleague, which contains everything. You’re still thrown into that database.”
Hillsdale College’s version of Ellucian Go launched in June and became available to the entire student body in August.
“One of the reasons it was such a priority for us is that students, adults, everyone now seems to be using mobile devices for most things,” Miller said. “It used to be that you’d go home at night, pull out the laptop, watch TV, surf the web. Now that’s happening more on the phone…We wanted something that gave the students the ability to handle their student life via their phones.”
Hillsdale’s Ellucian Go has 2,198 users, and traffic has nearly tripled since August, according to statistics from ITS.
“Depending on how well it goes long term, it would be nice to potentially make our own personal app,” Miller said. “But it’s like anything else. If we put it out there and it doesn’t get used, then we know not to dump a bunch of resources into it.”
Miller said the best thing about the app is that it’s easy to use.
“It lets you do a lot of what you need to do as a student on your phone,” he said. “There’s a lot of functionality there that I think is valuable to students.”
