UTSA turns scheduling classes into one-stop shopping

(Oct. 17, 2003)--If the brains behind Amazon.com were to take over the higher education business, their registration system might look a lot like the one at The University of Texas at San Antonio.

Normally, the spring semester schedule of classes would hit newsstands by the end of October. But starting now the schedule of classes will be available online only, making shopping for spring classes as easy as Amazon has made book-buying.

Students can click the "class schedules" link off the ASAP Web page and search the possibilities using various criteria.

For example, a student can go to the site and choose to view upper-division English classes in the afternoons on the 1604 Campus only. One click of the mouse and classes meeting the entered criteria will appear on the screen, complete with all the information students normally find in the paper schedule -- date, time, location, instructor, notes, comments and number of seats available.

The more advanced online version even allows students to download selected classes into an Excel spreadsheet that shows a mock schedule.

"I think it's going to be so much better," said Sandy Pottorff, associate director of academic publications. "The new one-stop shopping version of class schedules is convenient, but more importantly, it is live data giving students up-to-the-minute information, unlike a printed schedule."

Although the online move is new, the idea is old. According to Pottorff, the registrar's office had to wait for the technological advances to make it possible.

Once the technology became available, the registrar's office handed the project to Patty Clark in information technology, who had the schedule online in about four months.