Metamorphosis at my.Harvard

Around this time last year, Harvard students campus-wide were balancing two thick paperback books, one on each knee, in an awkward attempt to choose classes. They were punching in long URLs to get to course websites and course videos, and they were googling to find the dates of the College’s spring break.

Now, with the recent launch of the revamped my.Harvard portal, students can shop courses, keep calendars, watch course videos and access Webmail all from the same page. Whereas the old portal was next to useless, the new one is next to indispensable. Faculty of Arts and Sciences Computer Services (FASCS) and the iCommons team should be commended for their efforts in overseeing the creation of a tool that will make hectic life at Harvard a lot more manageable.

The shopping feature in the new my.Harvard portal is especially welcome. Harvard courses are hard enough to navigate already without having to rely on the cumbersome CUE guide and the massive Courses of Instruction booklet. Now instead of flipping, students can click. In the future, we hope the my.Harvard portal will partially replace some of these printed tomes to save paper and energy. Until then, the course shopping functionality is an invaluable addition to the tools Harvard students can use in exploring the varied courses the College has to offer.

Like courses themselves, course websites are only as good as the person in charge of running them. Whereas chemistry course sites include reams of old finals and gigabytes of course videos, some small humanities courses don’t even include a syllabus. The new my.Harvard portal puts these course websites at the forefront, making them easily accessible and making administrators more accountable. With course websites well integrated into a popular student portal, head TFs and professors will be more likely to keep them up.

My.Harvard also appears to have some staying power. Once course shopping ends, there are many other reasons for Harvard students to continue using the portal. Students can access their employee payroll stubs, use the improved calendar function to keep an online schedule and easily navigate important Harvard websites. These features will likely be enough to sustain student loyalty to the site.

We hope that my.Harvard will catch on beyond shopping period, because it can be an effective way for all organizations on campus—not just official College business—to disseminate information. There are more improvements to the portal that could truly cement my.Harvard’s usefulness: chief among them a way for student organizations to automatically add events and meetings to the calendars of their members. If Harvard students could specify the student organizations to which they belong, the announcements and calendar entries they receive could be customized for each student. Student groups already appoint members to run their mailing lists. Why not give those same people the power to add student group events automatically to the my.Harvard calendars of all their members?

The my.Harvard portal is a great success this year. FASCS responded to student demand and created an integrated portal that, while far from perfect, will finally help organize the chaos of life at Harvard.