Student registration undergoes changes

By this time next year, student registration will be completely revamped. Changes made by the Office of the Registrar have already begun this semester and will continue through next fall.\nThe current Insite scheduling system will be replaced by a new OneStart system, IU Registrar Roland Cote said.\nThe new student information system will be formed as an asset to IU students. \nBy spring, registration and schedule adjustments will no longer be available by touchtone phone. Also, the SIS Enrollment Waitlist will not allow rainchecks for future semesters to be available. \nThe final change this spring will be the discontinued use of mailed grade reports to students; all final grades will be posted on Insite.\nBy fall 2004, RegWeb will be completely replaced with the new SIS Enrollment system. Also, future semester Schedule of Classes will not include a Course Listings Section; all sections will be available on Insite.\nTo find out grades in the past, students have had to use the touchtone phone service, which would require a small fee. However, due to low usage, costs associated with connecting the touchtone service to the new system would be prohibitive, Cote said.\n"By eliminating touchtone access and costs associated with checking grades, it will offset the lack of convenience associated with touchtone," Cote said. "We want students to use the Web. Automated telephones are not a terrific way to communicate."\nThe services on Insite will be in a completely new environment. Essentially, Insite is a passageway into the University's older systems.\n"We're developing an entirely new record system" Cote said. "Go to OneStart and get everything you need and more."\nOneStart is a portal created by University Information Technology and Services and is intended to become every IU student's homepage. It will take the place of Insite and with registration and new services coming up, Cote said he hopes the new system will catch on.\n"Hopefully there will be a major blitz very soon, so the campus gets used to using OneStart," he said. "(Computers have) generally become so ubiquitive. We are trying to make students use the Internet."\nWith the new system slowly being integrated into the campus, it will make things much different for students and faculty members alike.\n"Insite was a little confusing at first, but after using it a couple times, it became easier," freshman Allison Chandler said. "As long as the new system is easy to navigate around and not any more difficult than this one, I think it'll be fine."\nJunior Cary Davis said he hopes the University makes sure the new system will be just as easy to use as the present system.\n"I think it's very easy to work with, even for somebody that's not necessarily computer literate," Davis said.\nThe first installment of the new OneStart system can be viewed at onestart.iu.edu.\n-- Contact staff writer Nicholas J. Schmidt at nschmidt@indiana.edu.