Contact: Chris Cory; [email protected]; 516-299-2642
For immediate release
STUDENTS AT LONG ISLAND UNIVERSITY
TO GET INSTANT REPORTS ON THEIR STATUS
Pioneering Student Information System
debuts in time for second semester.
Brookville, January 20 -- Long Island University students have one less thing to chew their fingernails over as the second semester starts this week. They no longer have to line up outside the offices of registrars, bursars, or financial aid officers to check on last-minute course changes, class locations, what they've taken in the past, what their grades were and all the details of their bills and financial aid awards.
It's all on the World Wide Web.
The University's new Student Information System provides those details 24 hours a day from any computer hooked to the Web (www.liu.edu), and from on-campus kiosks that are being installed in the next few weeks.
In addition to reducing hassles, the system should improve personal advising, since students can easily show their advisors their academic information during conferences.
"We're proud to be in the vanguard of U.S. campuses in offering this Web access service," said Michael Arons, the University Vice President for Academic Affairs, who spearheaded the project.
Moreover, the system provides more detail than comparable systems that the University's staff inspected -- items like transaction-by-transaction status reports on each source of financial aid and on every payment. "It's the students' information and we think they should have access to it," said Sal Greco, the University Data Base Administrator.
Student demand seems likely to be high. With no formal announcement, when the system was running in a test version during the last month, over 400 students found it and accessed their data.
Private. Students' privacy is protected at a higher level than that used by many businesses sending data over the Web, thanks to a secure computer server and "secure socket layer encryption." Users must provide a user ID and a password.
The system grew out of six months of development and testing by a team including the registrars, bursars and financial aid officers from all of the university's three residential campuses. It is available to students on the University's downtown Brooklyn, C.W. Post, Southampton College, Brentwood and Rockland campuses. Greco, who holds undergraduate and master's degrees in computer science, created the completely customized system using Oracle database and web server software.
Eighth largest. With the personalities of distinctive campuses and the resources of a large university, Long Island University is now the eighth largest private university in the United States. A doctoral degree granting institution tracing its roots to 1886, it educates over 25,000 diverse students from the United States and abroad at its campuses in the New York metropolitan area and the seven overseas academic centers of the Friends World Program.
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