Registration May Soon Take to the Web

An online course registration system may soon be in the cards for students.

Members of the Undergraduate Council and the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) are planning to discuss switching to a system of online study card submission, an issue which was first proposed by the council’s Student Affairs Committee (SAC) last fall.

The initiative coincided with plans to move other administrative programs online, including the add/drop system and course enrollment predictions.

Last fall students created a program to predict course enrollments and prevent the misallocation of teaching fellows as part of a final project in Computer Science 96, “System Design Projects.” Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 told The Crimson in February that the program might be used this fall.

But Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science Stuart M. Shieber ’81, who taught the design projects course, said he is unaware of any use of the program.

While administrators are not using software to predict course enrollments, they are exploring a variety of other technological tools.

Registrar of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Barry Kane said many of the features needed to launch an online registration system are already in place on Harvard’s website myharvard.edu.

“The shopping tool is actually a significant step toward on-line course enrollment,” Kane wrote in an e-mail.

“Electronic course enrollment would only mean confirming that the courses in the student’s shopping cart are the courses the student will be taking and then having the student proceed to check-out,” he wrote.

Chair of the Student Affairs Committee (SAC) Matthew J. Glazer ’06, who advocated for online course registration last year, said an online add/drop system would save students money.

“My hope is that if we transferred to an all-online system, there wouldn’t be any need for an online processing fee. We just need to make sure the technical system could handle this,” Glazer said.

Kane said that there are still some concerns with an online system. Administrators still need to determine how to ensure students seek in-person advice without having to get their study cards signed by their advisers, he said. Obtaining signatures for limited-enrollment courses might also be a problem under an online system, suggested SAC Vice-Chair Teddy E. Chestnut ’06.

But Shieber said that online registration could improve advising by requiring students to meet with their advisers well before they submit their study cards. He said that by eliminating the rush to have a study card signed, advising meetings might become more substantive.

Shieber suggested that students could then obtain any necessary signatures through the online system when they finalize their course plans.

“When you figure that out, you put it online, and the online system would notify the adviser. If you set things up right, an online signature process is more difficult to falsify,” Shieber said.

At Yale, where part of the registration process happens online, students still have to print out their study cards and submit them to Residential College Deans for signatures.

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.