Self-Service causes headaches for students
Sarah Campbell
Issue date: 11/16/09 Section: News
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Concerns encountered by students include incidents of accidently signing up for an online class or ending up in a course on another campus.
"I end up signing up for classes on the wrong campus every semester," said Paige Hannahs, a senior photojournalism major from Bryant.
It's happened every semester, even when they registered for me at [freshmen] orientation,"
I think the Jonesboro campus should be the default."
Some students are confused by how online classes are designated.
The label TBA, or to be announced, is the default for the time and place designation for online classes, since they don't have a set time or physical meeting place.
Students have signed up for a class that was to be announced, believing that the class meeting time and place hadn't been decided yet, and later discovered that they enrolled in an online course.
Beverly Weems, communication and training coordinator in the Office of the Registrar, explained why students have these problems and offered advice for navigating the system.
She said, right now, there is not a way to fix the default TBA for online classes, but you can see if a class is online by checking the instructional method when you click on the blue course number.
The instructional method will say Web if the class is offered online.
Weems also said a lot of problems are caused because students don't know that they can select multiple categories by first clicking on one option, holding down the shift key and then selecting an option further down on the list.
Through this kind of grouping, every category between the one a student first clicked on and the last one he or she clicked on will be highlighted in blue and added to the search criteria.
In addition, many students don't utilize the category options available when searching for classes on Self-Service and most don't seek out the information available through links in Self-Service.
"Be conscious of your selection. Read material about a course," she said. "Anything in blue indicate more information, click it and explore it."
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