Janet Gray, left, associate university registrar, supervises the course-conversion project. Jennifer Testut, center, and Sandi Goodwin, also from the registrar's office, help enter course descriptions into the PeopleSoft system at 120 Maple Ave. Robert Barker/University Photography
While much of the campus wonders about Project 2000 and what the new PeopleSoft administrative software will offer, a small group of staff members have been getting first-hand experience with some of it, along with a reminder of Cornell's diversity.
Since April, a group selected from a wide range of colleges and departments from across campus has been entering into the database of the new student administration system the thousands of academic courses available at the university. When they're done, course information will all be in one place, perhaps for the first time in the university's history, and students, faculty and staff will be able to use it with a click of the mouse. But it takes human beings to gather the information the computer needs.
"The PeopleSoft part is easy," said Cal Hile, an administrative assistant in the Department of Modern Languages who spends one day a week in a little room at 120 Maple Ave. entering her department's courses. "I don't have to enter the same information two or three times in different places, and it won't let you make a mistake," she said, explaining that the system checks the data for accuracy as it is entered. The hard part, she said, is the "homework," which consists of looking up information on the courses and getting the descriptions into electronic form so they can be copied into the PeopleSoft database.
"Some information on courses is not in electronic form. It's just verbiage on a page," explained Janet Gray, associate university registrar, who is in charge of the course-conversion project.
Some departments have course information in databases, but no two are using the same format, so the information can't merely be copied from one computer to another, she said. And in many cases, especially for courses that haven't been taught in recent years, there's nothing to work with but the printed catalog.
"We tried scanning, but it didn't work well on the catalog," Gray said. "There wasn't that much typing, but we had to do some."
When necessary, members of the group are retyping their course descriptions into Microsoft Word documents, then cutting and pasting into the PeopleSoft forms.
"The course-offering list existed in our computer, but descriptions didn't exist in any [computer-readable] form," said Ginny Freeman of ILR Student Services. "We just did cut and paste. PeopleSoft wants more information than what we had online, but it's information that's been asked for. For example, the state of New York requires some reports that deal with credit and contact hours. We had a separate report we had to do independently, and hopefully with Project 2000 we'll be able to get that online."
Typically, Gray said, the university offers about 4,500 to 5,000 courses in a given year. But some courses are not offered every year, so the database will contain many more than the yearly number, she said. Workers in her group started with courses offered in 1993 and worked forward, on the theory that that will cover every course that has been taken by students currently registered.
"About 90 percent of courses are offered every year," Gray said, "and we've pretty much got those in. We're working now on the 10 percent that are new courses for each year."
In the future, she said, new courses will be entered directly into the single PeopleSoft database, rather than into the hodge-podge of separate systems that now exist around campus.
Gray has recruited staff members from around the campus who are already familiar with the courses offered by their colleges and departments. They work alongside a few university registrar staffers selected for their familiarity with courses.
Most have found that PeopleSoft software wasn't as intimidating as they had expected. "I had anticipated getting used to a lot of changes. But it's not that different," said Rodney Orme, who entered economics courses. "You can see one process done and how it ties in with another."
And the project has some hidden benefits that go beyond the important task of entering data, according to Cecilia Cowles, communications manager for Project 2000. "These people are working together, getting a good working introduction to this technology and meeting people they hadn't known before who do the same kind of work they do," she said. "A lot of what P2K is doing involves more than the technology."
The group gets together in a room set up at Cornell Information Technologies' facility at 120 Maple Ave., with 10 PCs running the PeopleSoft Client, a program that runs under Windows 95 and connects the user directly to the PeopleSoft database. When the room is full, Gray said, there's pretty constant chatter, which ranges from gossip to questions like, "How do you spell ribonucleic acid?"
With the complete installation of the PeopleSoft system, along with written descriptions of courses, each record will contain information about prerequisites, how often the course is offered and other details. When a student attempts to enroll in a course, the system will automatically check to see that the student has fulfilled the prerequisites.
But before the system can do its job, all the course information has to be in the database, Gray said. A recent rearrangement of the Project 2000 schedule that postponed the roll-out of the student system for a year doesn't change that, she said. In fact, she said, the delay takes some of the pressure off and means that the conversion is more likely to be completed in time.
Her project began April 6 and is expected to be finished by Aug. 1. But that's only the beginning, Gray said. Converting student records, she said, can't begin until the course information is in place.
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