Banner Briefs: March 15, 2007

The New Schedule of Classes

The Schedule of Classes for Summer and Fall 2007 are now available in Banner. Friday morning they will replace the existing schedule of classes available through the Schedule of Classes Web site at www.newpaltz.edu/classes.

There are some significant differences in the schedule under Banner. First, we are using all of the Banner designations for the various selection criteria. General Education, Writing Intensive, etc. are now under Course Attributes; the distinction between graduate, undergraduate and ESL is now the course level (both courses and students have levels). A big change is that we have one summer session and multiple 'parts of term' within. If you search by part of term, you will find "Summer I" under "First Part of Term" , "Summer II" under "Second Part of Term", the online and a few other courses under "Full Term," and of course, everything under "All" .

All of the course restrictions entered in the Course Catalog should have been brought down onto the individual sections, and if desired they can be altered to suit a particular section. Those few courses that still had a "permission chair" or "permission dean" should now be labeled "Special Approval." These had to be manually added at the section level, so please check your courses to make sure they are correct. When viewing the schedule, you must click on the course / section title to drill down into the course to see the enrollment and any course restrictions.

Many courses are still cross listed in Banner, but the mechanism and the results are different. For example, Asian Studies courses now have an Asian Studies course number and title. This course is tied back to the 'controlling' course behind the scenes. Banner will let students register for either course and manage the pooled enrollment. The course in which they register will appear on their transcript. Since this is new and required additional set up time, we have limited the cross listing activity this time out to program areas that would simply have disappeared without it.

By default, all waitlist counts have been set to zero. We do not like the way Banner handles wait lists. It does not close the course and will let other students register around those on the wait list. In Banner version 8 (we're using 7.3 right now), they are rewriting the way the system handles waitlists making it rule driven so that we can control what it does. So, probably by the time we are doing Fall 2008 pre-registration we will revisit the question of whether to use waitlists.

Contributed by Jon Lewit