Meeting Minutes 7-16-09 Complete

ADVISEMENT DATABASE COMMITTEE MEETING NOTES for 7/16/09 Present: (no particular order) Janet Vera, John Mosbach, Enrica Hodder, Deri Leong-Miller, Ian Keil, Christina Aumann, Chris Noll, Diana Jaramillo (Note taker), Michael Kurland (Chair), Heather Cartagena (Ex-officio). 1. Testing New Features on Staging Server • Michael reported when you “create new” from an existing document, the original creator’s contact inforemains. This was fixed. • Will load this weekend. 2. We like “fill in” for title/label on the course plan rather than drop down options. Title/label will be visible in advisement history list with a 50 character maximum. 3. Gradterm on course plan – what is the best way to achieve this? • Auto fill from DTRAK and advisor can edit? • Drop down menu? • If it’s searchable it can link to a report function for getting that info to Provost’s office. • CONSENSUS: Prompt user to enter/select a gradtermwhen sending the 3rd or 5th semester audit e-mail. This data will get saved so that it is reportable. • Gradterm also in course plan title? Could it be auto-filled from the prompt after saving? We will check into the cost of this and may leave it to the user to add when titling the course plan if the cost is very high to implement. 4. Common notes or disclaimer text • Some prefab notes are on the advisement sheet. Heather suggested that we start with those and then see if we need to expand and add more. • Notes on the advisement sheet template can be customized by department. Bring that feature to the course plans. • Advisement sheet has a disclaimer note. We can add that to the course plan. 5. Save Draft/Delete Course Plan • How much time to edit final version? One hour seemed reasonable to all. Heather will check on how this would affect our system resources. • How long to save as draft? We agreed that one week seemed like plenty of time. Heather suggested that the system could send an e-

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mail reminder two days before the one week window ends. After one week without user saving as final, the system will purge the draft. Can advisors delete course plans or other documents in which there are errors? This raises ethical concerns. It could it be limited to Provost’s office and advisors could request for particular things to be deleted. Or, one administrator from each unit could be designated to have that ability. “Save as draft” option only appears the first time a document is created. User cannot go into a draft and save as draft to extend edit time beyond one week.

6. Auto-Populate remaining requirements into course plan for audits a. Programming required to do this is too complex and would be expensive. b. Too much computing power needed c. Duplicative of STARS. Provost would not put money there. 7. Students access course plans through myUSC a. Check box on course plan to share (Y/N). b. Only one per active major/program will be visible. When advisor indicates a new one to be shared, it will wipe out the other. c. We can flag the course plan in the advisement history as the “myusc” shared one. d. This document should be a PDF, not a Word document. 8. Course plan appears on all tabs a. Moot point with our new filtering capabilities in the advisement history. 9. Quick Print so that documents do not open before being prompted to print a. Heather will check on cost. b. This is not a top priority. 10.Audit-related functionality improvements a. Item #2: “Add ‘3rd semester audit’ and ‘5th semester audit’ to the email tagging options when clicking on the e-mail link under a course plan.” This is an option now on any outgoing email. b. Items #1 and #4 are related. They suggest making the reporting and tracking of the audit information more automatic and built in to the system. We need to discuss these ideas more.