25 CommentsColumbia’s a mess of bureaucracy. We all know that. You even have to deal with bureaucracy online – think class registration. Open SSOL. Open the Directory of Classes. Open the Bulletin. Open CULPA. Flip back and forth like mad as you try to correlate classes between the directory and SSOL and the Bulletin, check up on their teachers on Culpa, and register for what’s (hopefully) the right class. It’s insane. And it’s why the recent changes to various administrative websites are a big, promising step in the right direction. Bwog Techonology Specialist Mark Holden brings you a discussion of some of the changes that have been made, and what direction future changes need to take.
Health Services
The Health Services website has moved into the 21st century in multiple ways: the design is nice and aesthetic, and now it’s possible to schedule an appointment online. I mean, that’s sort of a “d’oh!” feature these days in the world of e-commerce and social networking, but at least now they’ve got it.
SSOL
The previous incarnation of SSOL was starting to show its age, and while the new SSOL design is pretty snazzy, unfortunately the design is about all that’s different. The underlying software remains as counterintuitive and difficult to use as it’s always been. Admittedly, it’d be more work for Columbia to overhaul SSOL from the ground up, but damn, the system needs it. The changes to SSOL so far amount to taking an old lemon of a car, repainting it, and failing to repair the engine. While they’re nice, they’re not enough – we need a complete overhaul.
Directory of Classes
Nothing has changed. Everything needs to change. The directory of classes is so unprofessional looking that when I first encountered it as an almost-freshman, I immediately clicked away thinking that it was an outdated resource. I’d imagine I wasn’t the only one. Look at it! Look!!! Look at that logo! Read it straight across like a normal human being and look what it says: “Directory University Columbia of Classes.” Disturbingly poor design on the part of a multi-billion dollar university. Worthless!
Neuroscience Department (www.depression-studies.org)
Snazzy layout, and you can register online to participate in research studies (i.e. answer questions for pizza money)! Everybody wins.
Environmental Stewardship
Columbia has a stylish new website devoted to saving the world. It provides in easily-comprehensible format lots of resources for environmentally concerned students, such as info on “green computing” and “reduce, reuse, recycle.” It looks promising both for the environment, in terms of the content it presents, and the people that might want more info, in terms of usability and design.
What needs to happen
The current registration system is a disgrace. It’s the most back-asswards, confusing, unmanageable registration system on the face of the earth. SSOL, the directory of classes, and the bulletin currently are three distinct entities, when really they should be linked together so that students can easily read about classes and major requirements from within SSOL and then with one click register for the right class. The present system is awkward, unwieldy, and confusing, an outmoded dinosaur from the early days of the internet that somehow hasn’t yet expired. It’s about time it were scrapped.
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25 Comments
@HA HA you go to barnard.
@bc student if you think that’s bad, look at barnard’s. we don’t even get the privelege of using SSOL! eBear is so outdated it’s not even funny. not to mention that fact that we can’t even complete our entire registration online….. woohoo l-course registration
@abc “It’s the most back-asswards, confusing, unmanageable registration system on the face of the earth.”
And yet I now go to a grad school that still conducts registration through filling out paper slips and bringing them to an office to be inputted.
@bwog sucks hey bwog, before you start complaining about columbia’s pages, fix your own. make it so that when i click “back,” it goes back to where i was on the previous page, not just to the previous page. every other blog in the world does this.
@hah check out how different administrative departments have different design schemes.
CUIT is overhauling all its archaic pages.
Student Services is overhauling theres with matching scheme.
Student Affaits… hasnt really updated any sites except Admissions- which is pretty snazzy now.
Check some other awesome dated/tacky pages:
Provost’s office:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/provost/
President’s office:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/president/
@heres another bone Yale has had ‘flexlife’ since 1995.
http://www.yale.edu/opa/ybc/v25.n17.news.04.html
@its called a PORTAL Yale: http://portal.yale.edu/
UPenn: http://medley.isc-seo.upenn.edu/penn_portal/portal.php
More on Penn: http://www.upenn.edu/computing/pennportal/portaloverview/
Student Run Portals
Yale: http://yalestation.org/
Columbia’s useless Portal: http://my.columbia.edu
Columbia’s was designed to help administrators, and thats all that was developed.
There’s a feeling that theres no demand for this kind of thing at columbia, so its low on the totem poll. We have courseworks, cubmail, ssol, etc. The aim is to revamp ssol (which while ugly, is very functional) and overhaul courseworks (‘sakai’).
I threw this together in my spare time. Some links need to be updated though.
http://www.columbia.edu/~mrp2104/crown/
Other stuff- Dartmouth has a student developement organization: https://basement.dartmouth.edu/
@back-asswards is a pun on “ass-backwards”. get it, it’s backwards? irony.
@no, I don’t get it. “ass-backwards” already means extremely backward. Punning on a pun leaves you where you started and doesn’t make sense.
@rjt Come on, you guys, it’s using ass-backwards (which is NOT a pun, so there is no punning on puns here) along with the “Directory University Columbia of Classes” thing.
@Anonymous It bwoggles the mind!
@is bwog having server problems?
@Anonymous Cubmail and the Directory are the two websites that need the most work.
@I dunno... I agree with #2 in that if something gets the job done, it doesn’t matter how pretty it looks. However, I do enjoy aesthetically pleasing websites over rudimentary frames and search boxes — and I figure that at the very least, all of Columbia’s sites should have some sort of theme. As it is, Cubmail looks nothing like the Directory of Classes, which is vastly different from the housing and dining websites, etc. Pick something, dammit! If you’re gonna update some sites to make them look like they’ve been updated in the past decade (e.g. Housing, SSOL most recently), then do it for all of them! There’s a reason I use Mozilla Thunderbird for my Columbia email instead of Cubmail…ick
@bah how boring…it would be torture to spend as much time as we all have to on these sites if they were all the same…
@Mike Haha, as opposed to the thrill-fest that reading the Directory and navigating your DAR is now?
@have you ever done your taxes? as we can say for much of what is shitty about columbia, at least it thoroughlly prepares you for the obscene shittiness of real life.
@yes that seems to be the goal. have you read the enrolled student survey carefully? learning to navigate bureacracy is one of the skills they claim to be trying to teach. no joke. making our lives miserable is their avowed mission. but thats not why i wanted to come to college…
@Uhh I don’t relate at all to this article; it seems like it was written from a rather technophobic perspective. My GUI isn’t pretty? Gasp! It must be dispensed with immediately! Ornament over utility! Function follows form!
While I agree that it would be convenient to have registration integrated into the course directory, I’ve never really thought it much trouble to input a 5-digit number from the directory into SSOL. With the advent of tabbed browsing, it’s not even that hard to switch back and forth. And honestly, something as utilitarian as a course directory, changing as often as it does, doesn’t demand that polished an interface. The point is that it’s easy to find information quickly, which is the case on the current website.
This article does nothing to back up the claim that the system itself is unwieldy.
Also, it’s ass-backwards.
@I agree with the critique of form over function; look at what happened to the housing website…
@B.S. Typing in a five digit code number from one page to the next is arcane. I work in one of the thousands of IT fiefdoms on this campus, and it’s only that disunity that keeps you from having a “Register for this course” button in the bulletin. A logical interface is its own reward… yikes!
@the system rewards the astute. I put in a lot of effort and strategy to get my classes…let natural selection take its course (bad pun).
@don't relate? I’ve been annoyed at the whole registration system since freshmen year. I have to look up classes that I want to take on the bulletin, then find out their call number on the directory, then copy and paste that into SSOL? Come on, that’s horribly ineffecient.
@Shem If it annoys you that much, register by phone!
@Not to mention Cubmail is still a steaming pile of shit.