EMEA Presentations

In Fall 2014, PeopleSoft Campus Solutions made its debut at Koç University along with Program Enrollment functionality. It was a bold decision at that time to go live with Program Enrollment as Koç University was among the first to implement it. However, thanks to a serious internal team effort with the support of implementation consultants, Koç University students, faculty and staff have benefited from Program Enrollment during four enrollment periods. Thus far, the system is progressing smoothly and is expected to continue in the same way.

Why did Program Enrollment win over Academic Advisement? Koç University’s legacy system was lacking structured and well-defined curricula, and one of the major drawbacks was the inefficiency in tracking students’ progress towards graduation. After a series of discussions and evaluations, the stakeholders and project team chose Program Enrollment over Academic Advisement since enrollment is controlled by students’ program requirements (such as mandatory and elective courses), students know what courses to take and when, and this structured approach has paved the way for better management and tracking of academic progress. The aim of this presentation will be to share how Program Enrollment has been structured, configured, and implemented, as well as future possibilities for utilization of this functionality at the university.

Configurations on Program Enrollment were started by building various template structures under the categories of historic, undergraduate (several new ones), exchange and graduate templates. “Historic templates” were designed to cover all major and double major templates for all current undergraduate students that were active in the legacy system prior to implementation. Academic Item Registry (AIR) templates and Academic Progress Trackers (APTs) were populated using data migration that saved the internal team from manually assigning courses to these templates. However, new templates were also created from scratch. During this process, Academic Item Registry (AIR) components such as program formats and enrollment categories were created and configured. The next task was to create the course lists and course groups in order to associate these with each relevant program template.

As for Student Self Service, the course planner page got more user-friendly with the addition of new icons and the placement of students’ final grades next to their attempted courses. Students were involved right at the start of the project to test the usability of different setups in Self Service. With better and more efficient progress-tracking in mind, the Academic Progress Tracker (APT) Report (in pdf format) was developed, which can be easily accessed via Self Service. On this report, students are able to see the credits that have accumulated under each course category (core, required area, area elective and general electives), courses in progress, attempted and failed courses along with credits and grades as well. The APT report is accessible by students, faculty, and administrators. Work is in progress in order to make the APT report visible for multiple students in a summarized report format. This will also become one of the components utilized for assisting in monitoring students’ academic progress.

The session will include more detail on:
• why Program Enrollment was chosen over Academic Advisement,
• outline of the business process supported by Program Enrollment,
• what kind of Program Enrollment structure was implemented,
• minor adjustments on student Self Service to make screens more user-friendly,
• additional Academic Progress Tracker Report output created,
• current customizations taking into account the improvements made by Oracle that will take place after bundle upgrades.