Part of the team involved in the two-year eVision project (from left) Patricia McNaughton, Susie Tay, Brendan Reid, Janet Norton, Tessa McCulloch and Jenny Officer.
More than 50 enhancements to eVision will be rolled out during the next two-and-a-half years as part of a major project to make the system and processes more user-friendly.
Business Systems senior manager Patricia McNaughton says the student management system has had a few significant enhancements since its full implementation in 2015, but other issues have had to be addressed as time allows.
"It's important to remember, this is a roll-out of enhancements. Some of the changes will be obvious, others people might not notice, but they will all streamline and improve processes."
“This is the result of ongoing issues that we have been hearing from staff and students and feedback from the SSR.”
Nine staff from Information Systems will be working on the enhancements with active involvement from subject matter experts throughout the University.
The first of the major enhancements – around scholarship application and assessment – should be completed within the next two weeks, followed by changes to Research Management and Online Change of Courses just a few weeks later. Depending on the type of enhancement, these will be rolled out over the next eight months.
“The change of course system is very manual with staff having to make changes to a student's enrolment after the student has course enrolled for the year. The move towards online change of course will enable students to make some of those changes themselves,” McNaughton says.
“It's important to remember, this is a roll-out of enhancements. Some of the changes will be obvious, others people might not notice, but they will all streamline and improve processes.”
Overall, the enhancements aim to:
- Reduce manual input and duplication across services
- Enable staff to do a number of tasks that they currently have to request through the SMS Support team
- Let students track their application's progress and access documents they have uploaded
- Streamline postgraduate enrolments within eVision
- Improved functionality to monitor student development across the University
- Integrate with the online student accommodation management system, StarRez, so students do not have to supply the same information separately to eVision and StarRez
- Standardise processes
- Identify roadblocks