Cal Poly students will return in fall to a newly-improved, easy-to-use POWER class registration process thanks to input from 500 students for the yearly Student Campus Computing Committee (SC3) Information Technology Services (ITS) SWEEPS survey.
As of April, this year’s survey results have been tabulated and changes are being implemented to improve the campus’s technology experience.
SC3 Chair Todd Maki said that the results were what the committee expected.
“We’re students, so we are pretty much on target,” he said.
Decluttering the my.calpoly portal is a major student concern. ITS plans to give students the ability to personalize their portals so that only information pertaining to each student’s specific major shows up on the page.
According to the survey, “high priorities” pertaining to the Oracle calendar system included the “ability to schedule meetings with other students, ease of creating meetings (click and drag)” and “readability.”
Sentiments about the e-mail system widely varied.
“I think it works fine,” recreation administration senior Gabe Uribe said. “You can send e-mail, (and) you can receive e-mail.”
However, Uribe said he uses Yahoo! mail because it blocks spam e-mail better than Cal Poly’s system, by placing it in a separate “bulk mail” folder from the inbox.
Music sophomore Michael Kelly had a low opinion of the original e-mail system, implemented before the newer Oracle system, and he has since stopped using the Oracle system entirely as a result.
“I think it sucks. You can’t organize anything easily. Everything’s pretty antiquated,” Kelly said.
He also felt that there was not enough storage space for old e-mails, and that they were hard to find when he needed to access them. However, these problems have been solved, or at least addressed, as a result of the annual survey.
SC3 will work in conjunction with the Instructional Advisory Committee on Computing and the Administrative Advisory Committee on Computing to make the desires expressed in the survey a reality.
Previous survey results have produced the portal (both the original and the newer version), improvements within the e-mail system and even wireless Internet on campus.
“We’re the reason (for) wireless (Internet) on campus,” Maki said.