MyCATS student and staff Web site to debut in November
Last semester, a call went out in the Student Digest, asking the students of GC&SU to name the new Web site the school was planning to introduce. MyCATS, as the new Web site was christened, will integrate several online components of GC&SU, including the PAWS website, student and faculty e-mails, and the CATS course lookup and registration, along with several new features.
A user’s login name for the MyCATS Web site will be the same as their Bobcat E-mail login name. Once logged in, the user will be directed to a student, faculty or staff homepage. From this homepage, students can access homepages for every course they are enrolled in, and faculty will be able to access homepages for every course they are teaching. These course homepages will include message boards for the students and faculty and an E-mail system for the class, much like the WebCT program already in use in many classes at GC&SU.
Opportunities to join different campus groups, such as sports teams and student organizations, will be available on the student and faculty homepages. The campus organizations can also send out group-wide messages and announcements through the MyCATS site. Another function available on the site is a calendar, so that users can keep track of their scheduled events.
An additional useful function of the MyCATS Web site will be the inclusion of several “hot” links from the PAWS student Web site. The PAWS site isn’t the most user-friendly Web site because of the extensive navigation involved to get through the different pages.
GC&SU’s Technology Solutions team is hoping to remedy this problem by including popular links from the PAWS site on the MyCATS page, such as the drop/add link for classes and the bill payment link. Clicking on these links will take the student straight into the PAWS system.
The MyCATS website will perform a lot of the same functions that the GC&SU Info Page now offers. The Info Page will probably change as MyCATS becomes more widely used, but it won’t change right away because it is used by outside sources. MyCATS is eventually supposed to become a single log-in site where students and staff can easily access sites like PAWS and WebCT.
MyCATS is being created by a team of GC&SU staff members in the Division of Technology Solutions. Webmaster Barbara Monnett is heading up the construction of the staff page, Instructional Technology Support Specialist Robert Ethier and Instructional Development Specialist Mazhar Malik are in charge of building the faculty homepage and Executive Assistant to the Vice President of Student Affairs Gina Peavy is guiding the creation of the student homepage. The Technology Solutions team has been working on the MyCATS website since February of this year and is expecting to open it up for a campus-wide test run in November.
“After we feel we’ve had a good testing for approximately three months,” said Kay Graham of the Division of Technology Solutions, “we hope to have it fully functional by February of 2006.”
The Web site was originally supposed to open up sooner, but there have been problems synchronizing MyCATS with Banner, the server that houses all of the student and faculty information and all course information. Once these bugs are ironed out, MyCATS will be ready to launch.
Once MyCATS starts up in November, Graham encourages students to give Technology Solutions feedback on what they like and dislike about the website, and what they would like to see on the homepages.
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Sep 16 2005. Filed under News.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
