Academic Planner

Submission Information:

1. Name of practice:
   • Academic Planner web application
2. Institution name:
   • The University of Montana, Web Technology Services
3. Description of the practice:
   • The Academic Planner was designed to improve student retention by making it easier for students to plan their academic careers.  The old planning process was both cumbersome and time consuming.  Students were required to look up courses in the printed or online course catalog, create a hand drawn schedule, fill out a paper advising form, take the form to their advisor and review the plan.  Students would then log into the UM student system to register for courses once again having to search for the required courses.  There was no separate planning process; students could not view their plan online without registering and future plans, being paper-based, were often lost or modified without notification to interested parties. 

     The Academic Planner has solved many of these issues. A student can use this single tool to search for courses, using intuitive and robust search capabilities, read the course description, add the course to the plan, view/print the resulting schedule, and save to a database for future use. Once the plan is completed the student can email the results to an advisor for electronic or in-person comments facilitating early advising when the student is not yet on campus. Alternative plans can be created to assess the feasibility of changing majors or rearranging classes. Storage of the plan in a secure database makes it accessible anytime from on or off campus.

4. Evaluation Criteria Responses:
   • Innovation:
     • The Academic Planner has given students the ability to plan their entire academic careers.  It is an intuitive web interface that allows students to select semesters, classes and class times to quickly and easily create and save multiple plans, resolve class scheduling conflicts and email their plans to their advisors for validation.
   • Benefits:
     • The Academic Planner is a tool that is useful to both students and advisors for efficiently planning their academic careers with the highest degree of flexibility. The tool has paved the way for a change in the orientation process now planned for summer 2010. Currently students travel to Missoula for a week-long orientation session during the summer in order to receive instruction on registration, among other things. With the cost of travel increasing this additional trip to the campus is difficult for many students. The Academic Planner will allow students to access all of the necessary tools online so course planning can be done from home. Preliminary advising can take place via email. As a result the plan is to move orientation to coincide with the beginning of the semester, reducing the time and cost impact to the incoming students.

       Another benefit is the storage of the plan in a secure database for retrieval at any time. Future additions to the tool will add advisor comments which will save the record of interaction between a student and their advisor(s).  

       Due to the design of the planner additional features such as degree auditing, major templates, and integration of course history with future plans can easily be added. The campus now has an Academic Planner user group which is defining the direction of the tool and actively advocating its adoption. 

   • Replicability:
     • The application is written in Java and utilizes the Spring framework and Hibernate.  Hibernate allows the application to interact with any relational database backend and the Java application will run on any Linux, Unix or Windows-based server.  The user interface is web-based and works with any standards-based web browser on any client operating system.  The system was written with specific enterprise software (Banner) queries to retrieve course data but could be modified to query specific class information from any system. 
   • Costs:
     • The costs involved in Version 1 of the Academic Planner were one programmer/analyst FTE for approximately one year .
5. Links to related information:
   • Presentation
6. Principal Contact:
   • Loey Knapp, Assistant Chief Information Officer, 406-243-6309
7. Other Contact:
   • Tom Fite, Senior Systems Analyst, 406-243-6283
   • Jon Adams, Systems Analyst, 406-243-5429