Today’s Staff Editorial
This university prides itself on innovation, technological advances and its increasing embrace of online education. But its digital infrastructure is feeble.
With class registration opening this week, thousands of students will be flocking to the Office of the Registrar’s website, Testudo. And what they find will likely mirror the experience of the thousands before them.
Frustration, confusion and general discouragement.
The site boasts “interactive Web services,” and “find it fast” in capitalized, italicized letters above all else. But the words carry more irony than truth.
Seven of the 11 links along the site’s left margin take users to unfamiliar new layouts without the same navigation tools. Some still use Testudo’s old look — one that screamed 1990s basic HTML. We’re glad that one is being phased out. Click on the left links on the old Testudo sites, and a wacky redirect process flashes pages before your eyes as it leads you to the new version of, say, “Schedule of Classes.”
Some open new tabs, others don’t. The one link everyone is going to be looking for — “Registration (Drop/Add)” — is in small font, at the bottom of a box in the body of the site.
Additionally, half of Testudo’s services are not available during many students’ most productive hours: the late-night grind. Students hoping simply to view their schedules or transcripts are not able to do so after 11 p.m. on any given night. Consider the frustrations of the many students who apply for internships or jobs that require unofficial or official transcripts, sometimes at odd hours because, well, college students do things at odd hours.
While the price tag for adding hours might be higher, it’s hard to see a legitimate reason class registration can’t be open 24 hours a day when services such as community assistants and the 24 Shop are.
And the problems don’t end with Testudo. The office offers an innovative “24-hour” service, Venus, in which students can plug in all of their intended courses and view their scheduling options. It’s simple and certainly should be promoted outside of the main Testudo page.
But students looking to find Venus using their address bars won’t find it under a logical URL: not venus.umd.edu or even testudo.umd.edu/venus.
Instead, Venus is hidden at the following URL: www.sis.umd.edu/bin/venus. Naturally.
Add that to TERPmail, the new ELMS — run by educational technology company Canvas — separate sites for South Campus Commons and Courtyards residents, the athletic department’s ticket service site and the confusingly titled MyUM, and living on our digital campus becomes even less appealing.
The 2013-14 Student Government Association presidential candidate Noah Robinson and his Time Party had a plank in their platform in the spring regarding consolidation of the university’s online services.
And though Robinson didn’t get the position, we can’t help but agree that such consolidation is a good idea, one that SGA President Samantha Zwerling should look into. The group’s outstanding social media initiative, WTF UMD, has seen complaints on these subjects and should seek ways to enhance students’ experiences.
It seems as if MyUM was once an attempt to offer such a consolidated service for students. But the site, which has been “experiencing some technical difficulties” for more than a week now, is one that quickly fades from students’ memories after enrollment and orientation.
To begin to make students’ digital experiences at this university match their physical experiences, consolidating and improving these sites by any degree would go a long way.
