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Registration and Financial Aid Checklists


CISOA 2020

Abstract

Mt. SAC was looking for an easy way to notify students of items they need to complete in order to get the best registration date to which they are entitled and the maximum financial aid for which they qualify. These items include if students have completed Assessment, Orientation, an Education Plan using DegreeWorks, have holds on their accounts, etc. Kenneth Frank, Senior Systems Integrator, at Mt. SAC, constructed the checklists using JAVA and Spring technology in a way that does not drag down performance of the Portal.

  • Registration Checklist
  • Financial Aid Checklist

 (Click each picture to enlarge)

Here is what students are saying about the checklists:

  • The Registration Checklist is helpful because it congregates useful information in an easily accessible way.
  • The Financial Aid Summary creates a single page that enables students to view everything they need to know about their financial aid status.
  • The checklists help students notice any problems that might have occurred, and allows them to correct it, without having to search through multiple pages.


What was the problem addressed?

Registration and financial aid processes can be complicated, especially for first-generation college students. Hence, Mt. SAC needed a way for students to be able to easily identify the requirements for registration and finical aid, and which of these requirements they still need to complete in order to guarantee themselves to the best date and time to register as well as receive financial aid. Previously, a rudimentary checklist existed in Banner Self Service, but this checklist was located in an obscure place within the Portal and even if you knew where you were going, it required many clicks to get there and this checklist did not address financial aid status.

Describe how the solution is considered a model practice

Our new real-time Registration Checklist (see Figure 1) and Financial Aid Checklist (see Figure 2) allow students to understand at a glance, if they are ready to register and receive financial aid. If any items are delinquent, the student can click the item to find out what they need to do to get the best registration time and date to which they are entitled and/or to receive the financial aid to which they are qualified. Note: the same checklist code works for both credit and noncredit students. The Registration and Financial Aid portlets were developed for high-traffic portal environments to provide real-time status information without making excessive database calls that slow down portal performance. This checklist delivery strategy can be used by other institutions regardless of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and portal vendor.

Mt. SAC’s Registration Checklist is built upon industry standards which allow the portlet to be both flexible to customization and easy to maintain.  The Java Spring Framework is used in the creation of the portlet which allows for loose coupling in both the front-end display and back end data retrieval of data.

The display technology is based on the JSR-168/JSR-286 portlet specification to handle the Action and Render phases of the portlet.  The project was created using the Maven archetype produced by Liferay and then extended using standard annotations to create data model objects which are cached in the portlet session for performance and displayed using standard JSP (Java Server Pages) web pages.  All data (other than obtaining the authenticated user id) is obtained through a service layer.

The Service which supplies the data is also a standard Java Spring web service project.  The service is similar to the existing “banportals” service supplied with Luminis to service the Banner Channels except that the service responds with JSON rather than XML documents.  The service is secured with Spring Security which allows for easy swapping of security methods or schemes.  The server, while currently written in Java Spring, could be easily migrated to and implemented within the Mobile Server for Ellucian Mobile as there are many similarities.  This would allow the same service to provide data to both the mobile application and the portlet at the same time.  Additionally, it would be easy to marry the services provided for other mobile applications into the portal with minor modifications and form “mash-ups” of the services and guarantee the same results in all display technologies.

What were the main challenges and how were they overcome?

We hired an outside consultant to develop a dynamic real-time checklist that indicates each student’s status, including whether or not they have submitted an Assessment Questionnaire, attended Orientation, filed an Ed. Plan, declared a major, paid and registered for classes.

The consultant took over a year of planning and development only to find out their solution would require many calls to the database each time an element on the checklist was rendered. This overhead worked for one of their smaller clients, but would have caused a significant degradation to performance had it been deployed to Production. Mt. SAC has over 30,000 students register for each major term and keeping the Portal running at an optimal level is a must. Another solution was needed.

Ken Frank, our Senor Systems Integrator, reviewed the consultant’s strategy and leveraged his systems integrations and single sign-on knowledge to create JAVA-based portlets that are capable of delivering the checklist data. Furthermore, these portlets retrieve the data in real-time from Banner with minimal calls to the database and without using the vendor’s proprietary Ban Portals code.

What was the outcome? Describe how the outcome resolves an issue relevant to the scale and mission of the institution, district, region or system.

Part of the Mt. SAC Mission Statement reads the College pledges to prepare students for lifelong learning through the mastery of basic skills, the achievement of associate degrees and certificates, and the completion of career and transfer pathways. By knowing when and how to achieve the best registration dates and receiving financial aid, students are able to achieve their goals faster and are provided a better experience while studying at Mt. SAC.

Describe how the project benefits students, faculty and/or staff?

The Registration Checklist helps students understand their registration status in real-time, including whether or not they have submitted an Assessment Questionnaire, attended Orientation, filed an education plan, declared a major, paid and registered for classes. Similarly, the Financial Aid Checklist helps students understand their financial aid status in real-time, including if they have any holds, if any documents are missing, if their academic progress is satisfactory, their estimated cost of attendance and their financial aid award amount.

Describe how the project contributes to an efficient use of resources at a college

While these checklists were written for students and have helped countless students understand their registration and financial aid status, these checklists have helped staff even more. Mt. SAC Staff is able to focus on solving the more difficult and unique situations since simple registration and financial aid status questions are answered by the checklists.

Summary

Kenneth Frank, Senior Systems Integrator, at Mt. San Antonio College, constructed Registration and Financial Aid checklists using a display model that is agnostic to the information provided. The checklist technology uses JAVA and Spring technology and allows Mt. SAC the flexibility to provide a single portlet that can display customized content from disparate sources for multiple student types (Credit, Non-Credit, International, and Transfer). In other words, the checklists display content specific to their intended audience without excess calls to the database that would otherwise significantly drag down performance.