Students to face changes enrolling
by Rawly Bransom, Sports Editor

   The new registration system for spring semester will offer advantages for students, TCC officials report.
Colleague, the new system being implemented for spring registration, is an integrated database that will allow for several new possibilities for students.
   The newest advantage of the system is students’ ability to check their transcripts against their degree plans and determine what courses they need to take, Chris Stevens, the associate director of admissions and registration, said.
Students can use the feature to figure out classes for the semester, future class loads or approximation of graduation dates, Stevens said.
   Under the old system, the only way to accomplish this task was either spending several personal hours figuring it out or going to see a counselor, who would manually do the work.
   The evaluation system is based on equivalency tables that, according to administration, will be an ongoing process.
   “The system [Colleague] will allow for more accurate and consistent evaluations than under our current Legacy system,” Stevens said.
   The new system should take students only approximately two minutes to complete, and the on-line payment system will take approximately five minutes, according to Stevens, who oversees the new system’s implementation.
  Times for registration will also be affected by the new system. Registration will be closed completely on Sundays and   Mondays as a precautionary measure, according to Stevens. Datatel, the company who creates and maintains   Colleague, will upload what the industry calls packages on weekends. These packages include constant updates and improvements for the system.
  “Colleague is what is termed a packaged system, which means that all programming behind all the various systems is delivered directly from Datatel,” Stevens said.
   “This upload process cannot occur until the files are closed and cannot be interrupted once it is started,” she said.
   In addition to the packages, Colleague will send the system patches for any problems that occur. These patches can adversely affect new systems while correcting the problems they are made to fix, Stevens explained.
   According to Stevens, TCC receives 50 to 100 packages a week.
   “Often times, a patch can fix one problem, but cause another. Blocking registration on Mondays, which is when most problems will occur, is a precautionary measure to allow time for review of any loaded patches,” she said.
  Other problems with the new system will be addressed and fixed as they arise. Staff and faculty are still trying to learn and adjust to the new system, Stevens explained.
  “Our goal is to make the transition as seamless as possible, but we all need to be prepared to learn something different,” she said.