E-campus to be sole source of schedule info

Beginning Fall semester 2002, the university will use e-campus as the primary medium for distributing the semester schedule of classes. Vice President for Academic Affairs Douglas Brown announced the change and explained the reason in an e-mail to the JMU community yesterday.

"Using e-campus as the sole source of course information acknowledges our student population's growing preference for information in electronic format and offers the academic community other advantages as well," Brown wrote. "The electronic format will eliminate the lead time required to prepare a printed semester schedule booklet and allow academic units approximately four additional weeks for planning and revising their course offering files before students begin registration. As a result, departments will have more time to utilize course demand data before their course offerings are made available, and students will be using a reliable, up-to-date source of course information as they prepare for registration. We will no longer have the discrepancies currently existing between the printed publication and the final list of course offerings.

"The Office of the Registrar will display the schedule in a format similar to that presented in the class schedule publication as a link to its home page (www.jmu.edu/registrar)," Brown wrote. "The formatted listings will support printing, so students who want to study a particular department's course listings in printed form may still do so. The registrar's office will also publish a booklet of registration policies and procedures so information usually appearing in the front portion of the printed schedule of classes — such as deadlines and instructions — will be available. In addition, the registrar's office will work with individual departments on a limited basis to produce printed department course offerings suitable for mailing to special need student populations."

University Registrar Sherry Hood said she thinks the changes will ultimately make registration easier, especially since most students exclusively use e-campus already.

Hood said the system is reliable enough to use it without an additional printed version. "We've had a very smooth registration this spring," she said. "Most of the issues we encountered at the early stages [of e-campus' existence] have been solved."

The hours of availability for e-campus, currently 7 a.m. to midnight daily, will remain the same, Hood said.

Some students said they won't miss the booklet. "It's just a waste of paper," sophomore Kelly Nguyen said. "I never pick one up."

Others were not so quick to accept the change. "That's not necessarily the best idea," junior Sara Evans said. "Sometimes the Internet shuts down and you have to sit around and wait for the schedules to be back online. Having a hard copy is handy."

— compiled from staff reports