Victoria Mescall
Editor in Chief
Sacred Heart University is moving to a new and more student-friendly course registration system called Colleague.
The goal of the move is to change the way that the university community overall approaches registration and advising.
“The current university culture of advising has just consisted of sitting with an advisor and choose your courses for next semester,” said the Executive Director of Student Success, Sean Heffron. “This is what the Office of Student Success hopes to change with the new program.”
The plan aims make registration less stressful for students while making advising more enjoyable. Academic Advisors will get to spend more time advising, developing, and getting to know their advisees and the new student Success Coordinators will help with registration logistics.
With the implementation of Colleague, it will still be mandatory for all students to meet with an advisor to have their registration block lifted and to discuss course schedules. However, registration will no longer be done on Webadvisor.
Colleague has new and advanced functions, such as easier class search abilities and a calendar spread so that students don’t have to make their own spreadsheet calendars in other programs. Instead, course schedules can be made easily in the Colleague Student Planning software itself.
Colleague also gives students access to easier functions, like how to find other sections of a specific course offered at different times, in the instance where two of a student’s desired classes conflict.
The new software will also allow students to plan up to two years’ worth of classes in advance.
“The idea behind the two-year planning is to give academic departments a heads up about what classes students want to take in the following semesters,” said Heffron.
As for the current process, academic departments estimate the number of necessary sections of each class based on last year’s figures for how many sections they offered.
“If every student plans out their two years using the new software, the different departments will know exactly how many sections to offer, and we will significantly reduce the number of course waitlists,” said Heffron.
The Student Success center noted that this update is important for more than just freshmen. In previous years, advisors were just teaching freshman how to register for classes. But this semester, sophomores and juniors, as well as advisors, will all be new to the process.
Because of this, the Student Success Center is incorporating an additional level of registration support in the form of Student Success Coordinators, who will help students learn how to navigate the registration software and how to register each term.
The Student Success Center will be hosting college-specific training sessions that will go into a little more detail about registration according to majors, but recommends students attend any of the upcoming general info sessions in the Edgerton Theatre on:
3/11 – 2:00, 3:00, 4:00
3/12 – 10:00, 11:00, 12:00
3/13 – 11:00, 12:00- 3:30
3/18 – 12:00, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00
3/19 – 12:00, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00
