This past summer, the Student Information System (SIS) was upgraded to provide students and faculty with a more modern, customizable user experience. Students and staff were consistently consulted throughout the process, and the improved system now includes new features such as homepage navigation, as well as personalized pronoun and gender identity options.

“Student and faculty feedback definitely played a huge role in the upgrade,” said third-year student and Undergraduate Student Government Vice President of Academic Affairs Radhika Duggal. “It began with a group meeting, the SIS User Experience Session, between several undergraduate students, graduate students and other administrators. Overall, the process was heavily reliant upon the team gathering feedback from students and faculty and returning with improvements that took our suggestions into account.”

The SIS Upgrade Leadership Team, which is comprised of University Registrar and Director of Student Information Systems and Services Amy Hammett, Manager of Application Development for Student Information Systems Matt Panchur, SIS service manager for University Technology Tony Kramar and Associate Director for Student Information Systems Stacy Mitchell, oversaw and guided the progress of this project.

“We examined feedback from various sources throughout the years, including student satisfaction surveys, that SIS was in need of an update and we wanted to be responsive to the community,” the Leadership Team collectively stated. “This feedback was the driving force behind what students and faculty see in SIS today.”

Case Western Reserve University strives to foster an inclusive and supportive environment on campus. In efforts to support all students, the Leadership Team explained that the new SIS upgrade enables students to include their personal pronouns and gender identity on their profile.

When asked about this new feature, the group said, “At first, when release plans had been shared in small groups of faculty, there were a few questions about pronunciation and definitions of personal pronouns, so we made sure to add easy access to reference materials from menus that appear alongside rosters.”

The Leadership Team expressed that the feedback towards this particular feature has been positive, adding, “There have been students who have expressed gratitude for including these options in the student system.”

As a research university with a wide range of needs and programs for undergraduate and graduate students, CWRU has employed the Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions Student Information System to address such matters.

“This product is also used by many other universities across the country because it is a robust system that can meet the complex needs of major research universities,” said the Leadership Team.

While the new SIS upgrade offers many new features, students and faculty can look forward to more updates in the future, including changes in faculty-facing pages.

The Team said, “This Campus Solutions upgrade is in relatively early stages of development and further incremental changes will be released incrementally by the vendor and applied on an annual basis by CWRU.”