MyCATS home to online lists

On March 28, Georgia College began sending out weekly emails called “GC Highlights” to announce events and information for the upcoming week.

This email, combined with the new web-based online sales and announce portals, are an effort to provide more useful, relevant information for students.

The student announce and sales lists are now located under the Student tab on myCATS. The new sections in myCATS allow students to see a title of topics to see if they want to click and find more information. The lists are also searchable by subject, author or message. Messages can also have images and other things attached to them, allowing more flexibility for posts.

“This will be a pull technology verses a push technology so students will have to be proactive in order to keep up with current messages,” said webmaster Barbara Monnett. “The idea is that students will be more willing to look at the messages displayed in myCATS than to check them in email. Another plus is that messages will be delivered individually in a more timely manner and will not have to wait until a certain time of day to get a collection of messages.”

Monnett worked with SGA and Instructional Technology Support Specialist Jay Lancaster to devise the new system. Monnett was responsible for adding the new channels on myCATS while Lancaster worked on the conversion process. SGA helped give student feedback and input.

“Barbara Monnett and Jay Lancaster had been wanting to upgrade the system. They’ve been working on (the change) for a while,” said junior Maxwell Pichan, chair of the SGA taskforce for the project. “They were noticing a lot of students were just deleting the emails.”

Unlike the previous system, the new GC Highlight emails will not have an opt-out option, according to Pichan. Pichan hopes that students utilize the new sales and announce lists more than in the past.

“We think it’s a really great system, Pichan said. “Before it looked like it was coming from a typewriter, it’s definitely a big upgrade.”

Monnett feels the new system will allow students to find what they want quicker.

“I hope students will value the idea of messages not being sent to their email where they sometimes get lost in the total amount of emails everyone receives,” Monnett said. “They can now go and view the email at their convenience and will not have to search their emails for specific pieces of information.”

Posted by Matt Chambers on Apr 2 2011. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.