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Senate hears report about new course advising tools

Allison McGillivray, Campus Editor

Miami University Registrar Dave Sauter, Manager of Curriculum and Degree Audit Becky Sander and Associate Registrar of Curriculum and Student Success Carol Jones gave a presentation on the new Interactive Degree Audit Reporting System (DARS) and new advising tool and planning tool at University Senate Monday.

The interactive DARS will be made available to students the week of spring break.

Miami developed the DARS and has used the system since 1983.

A bill outlining updates to the advising system, including an interactive DARS, was passed through Student Senate last year. Jones said the Office of the Registrar has listened to the feedback.

"We've done plenty of surveys, we've brought consultants in and we've listened to Student Senate and everybody is saying the same thing, 'we need better advising, we need better advising tools and it needs to be more readily available and updated,'" Jones said.

The interactive DARS will have clickable graphics for each of the students' Miami Plan, major and division requirements to display their progress in completing each requirement.

In addition to the creation of the Interactive DARS, the Office of the Registrar will be implementing a planning and advising tool called u.Direct.

u.Direct will provide a generic roadmap for majors and minors so that students can build their course schedule term by term, according to Jones. Departments will create these roadmaps.

"Currently our degree audit is in university requirements and then you might see divisional requirements, major requirements and minor requirements," Jones said. "That's hard for students to understand because students don't think like that, they don't think in requirements."

Rather, Jones said students think about what classes they are taking each semester, which u.Direct provides the opportunity to do.

This tool will also inform Miami about which courses students want to take and allows for better advising information, according to Jones.

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A couple years down the road, students will be able to build their schedules with this tool and then put it into Banner Registration. This would allow for one step schedule creation.

According to Jones, u.Direct will allow students to block out time if they are an athlete or they work.

Senate also completed a survey about Miami 2020 Plan metrics and heard an update on accreditation.