The Office of the Registrar Advisory Board meet March 24th.
Most of the meeting related to a presentation from on of the office's staff members. The presentation was a brief overview and explanation of FERPA or the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. FERPA is a federal law that guarantees students privacy of their educational records. The law also guarantees that students can have access to their records at any time and, if they chose, can chose to lock or release their records to third parties. The Advisory Board was told that we were getting the presentation about FERPA because, despite its importance for every student, the law is fairly unknown on campus. This can become a problem if a student does have a need or want to hide their records. The Office of the Registrar informed the board that students who want to lock or release their records can chose to do so right of of their Student Center. It can be found under the "Personal Information" tab if you scroll down your student center, and they click on FERPA Restrictions. Also the office pointed out that under "Personal Information" you can change your current address, phone number, and other pieces of information the University would like to have for their students safety. For more information of FERPA visit registrar.wisc.edu/ferpa
The rest of our meeting we used to continue talking about our ongoing conversation about both the Student Center and the DARS program. The Office of the Registrar is currently in the process of updating and changing the Student Center and is now focusing on what things they should fix to make the Student Center easier to use. The board suggested adding a new "Help" function. The function we recommended would be both located on the main Student Center page and also when students go to enroll for classes. This would connect the student to the area of the Office of the Registrar's page that give information about what the student is having trouble with. Specifically we suggested adding "clickables" next to some of the more specific areas of the class search page that students have the most trouble with. The members of the Office of the Registrar promised to take the boards suggestions into consideration as they continue to work with program designers.
If you have questions or would like more detail on either FERPA or the new plans for the Student Center let me know!
-Becky Brauer
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4 comments:
What kind of discussion took place regarding the DARS? Thanks!
The discussion regarding DARS for the most recent meeting was fairly short, we had discussed DARS in much more detail in the previous meeting. In this meeting we recapped what we had been introduced to in the previous meeting. What that meeting included was a presentation of what the new DARS could look like, what things the Office of the Registrar would like to add, and the problems that would get in the way of them going forward in this. I will post another comment leaving the link for the website once I get it. Pretty much the new DARS is a high-tech, user-friendly version of what we have now. It's colorful and easy to read and has the capabilities of including links that would bring you back to the Student Center and other web pages so you can plan out your class futures. Of course non of this is guaranteed, the Office wants to improve DARS and introduced us to this new alternative to see how we felt about it. If you still have questions just ask!
Here is the link for the DARS Audit..just click on "interactive audit"
http://www.redlanternu.com/uachieve/demo
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