Staff develop online data resource for students

Students can now obtain degree information more easily thanks to three health professional school workers who created Academic Advisement, a degree audit system that is part of the University’s Integrated Student Information System (ISIS).

Academic Advisement electronically produces academic progress reports, helping to answer the all-important question: Has a student completed all the requirements to receive a degree?

Administrative staffers Ron Holt of the medical school, Sharon Stern of pharmacy and Judy Schaeffer of veterinary medicine pooled their considerable knowledge of rules and regulations to help usher in the new system, which provides student transcripts, grades, academic history, actions, statistics and course requirements.

“Since this information has always been provided manually, this is a happy surprise for everyone,” says Sharon Stern, an assistant director of admissions. “The academic progress of approximately 1,500 students was previously tracked by hand.”

Degree progress reports can now be produced within seconds by plugging into data already within ISIS. “We’ve literally been able to use this software as delivered without any customizations,” says Stern. “Since pharmacy has never had anything to address degree audit in the past, the key to success has been working together to test, test, test. We wanted to make sure our specific needs would be met.”

Most testing for the Academic Advisement ISIS module was done by a core team of staffers with technical assistance of consultant Jill Swamp. The team spent seven months on the project, including exhaustive testing before “going live” earlier this month.