The IT Division contributed substantively to another relatively successful e-Registration. The online registration of students opened on 2 January for medical students and on 15 January for the rest of the university, and up to Thursday, 30 January, 16 172 students had registered online for the 2020 academic year.
During registration an online “war room” consisting of Student Information System Support (SISS) and IT staff, was created to monitor and operate the system around the clock.
E-Registration is noteworthy because the service was jointly developed by SISS and IT in the mid-2000s. It first went live for registration in 2006, and in so doing, bought another 15 years of service for the homegrown Adabas-Natural Student Information System (SIS). The development formed part of the e-Campus Initiative. The SIS was enhanced by more modern web front ends at the time and the University was one of the first, if not the first, university in Africa to offer online self-registration.
The original software still operates on on-premises hardware, although there are performance challenges from time to time when it comes under heavy load. The emerging technology and people risks were significant reasons, amongst others, for the SUNStudent and SUNFin implementations that are currently underway. 2020’s e-Registration is consequently one of the last on the existing SIS, with e-registration slated to be handled in 2022 by the Academia service which is being implemented by the SUNStudent project.
Tags: registration