Students examining the new COD this morning will encounter a number of changes intended to improve the registration process, including waitlist and location information as well as an expanded course offering.
The newly released COD includes features to help students determine which classes have waitlists, the locations of classes and what type of instruction each class features.
Students now can tell if a course has a waitlist by rolling the mouse over the enrollment column.
Another new feature will allow students to access a campus map displaying building locations by clicking on the building mnemonic that accompanies the course listings, University Registrar Carol Stanley said.
According to Stanley, class location is determined by a "highly efficient and sophisticated scheduling algorithm."
Stanley said this program takes into consideration factors such as course size, the location of the course's department, a course's technology requirements and the times the course is scheduled. The program can place thousands of courses into rooms within minutes, Stanley said.
"Obviously sometimes a chemistry class needs to be in the Chemistry Building," Stanley said. "But the majority of the general pool of courses are done in this sophisticated program."
A third new feature of the COD is a column describing the type of instruction of each of the courses.
"This will show students if the course is a lecture, discussion, lab or independent study," Stanley said.
This feature is being instituted in anticipation of the PeopleSoft enrollment system that will replace the Integrated Student Information System in the next few years, Stanley said.
Though the registrar publishes the COD, individual departments are responsible for organizing courses by determining classes' content, size and instructors. When students or other members of the University see a deficiency in an area of study, they can work with those departments to create new courses.
This semester's COD features the addition of courses for the newly approved African Studies minor, according to Octavia Phillips, administrative assistant for the Institute for Afro-American Affairs and African Studies.
"We are trying to get more departments to offer more courses that are related to Africa," Phillips said. "There are only a few courses in a few departments that relate to Africa."
Phillips said her institute is working with academic departments to create more courses about Africa to give students opportunities to take Africa-related courses in various departments.
"For example, you wouldn't necessarily always see a student studying African affairs in the politics department," Phillips said. "But we are working to develop more classes in departments like this in order to make these students more well-rounded."
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