ITS created and launched the Course Scheduling System (CSS) to great acclaim in Fall 2001. A computer program used by academic departments and the Registrar’s office to produce schedules each term, CSS is easy to learn and simple to use. It has swiftly revolutionized the creation course schedules each semester: they are produced with much greater speed and efficiency.

Now that CSS has proven itself in a grace period remarkably without incident, we thought you might like to know just how such a project goes from idea to implementation. The long hours of writing the program, evaluating and testing it, and training users represent aspects of many of the projects ITS creates to improve campus life.

In a process that took about six months from concept to completion, a CSS Committee was assembled to discuss requirements for such a program. Members of the committee included staff from ITS, the Registrar’s office, and academic chairs. Committee member Alex Rotkop, the ITS Information Systems Specialist who would write the CSS program, summed up the requirements in a nutshell: “Faculty and staff wanted a program that would reproduce on the computer screen, as faithfully as possible, what faculty was used to seeing on paper all these years.” Program specs were evaluated and modified by the committee over a period of about a month, and writing the program commenced once the specs were approved. Irina Shor, ITS DB Support Specialist and IFAS Manager, served as information liaison between the committee and Rotkop; she supplied Rotkop with crucial changes and updates. Shor also created a program that would extract the information uploaded to CSS. At the same time, ITS Systems Analyst Karl Lum was creating a program that would both upload and download information to and from SIMS (Student Information Management Systems). The two ancillary programs comprise a crucial element of CSS and are used each semester for the preparation of the schedule.

The completed program was thoroughly tested and then reviewed by the committee. Careful scrutiny led to modifications. Once the modifications had been made, the committee viewed a complete demonstration of the program.

CSS was now ready to go into production. It was placed on the server and Shor and Rivera began to train each department chair (or designee) and secretary, the principal users. Voilà: the first electronic schedule, for Spring 2002, was created. More modifications were made once the program was put through its paces in “the real world”. But, thanks to a lot of careful planning, CSS is very flexible and can easily be modified.
CSS was an instant success. According to Associate Registrar Rivera, “All the academic departments got onboard immediately and consider the program truly beneficial. The Chairs agree that the process of creating a schedule has been greatly streamlined and facilitated.”

The hard-working staff in the Registrar’s office is pleased with CSS, too. Associate Registrar Rivera no longer has to manually load the entire database into SIMS each semester. A voluminous pile of paperwork has been eliminated, too. Originally, three staff members were needed to create a course schedule “from paper in all sizes and shapes and a million different handwritings received from the academic departments”, explains Rivera. In addition to the confetti-like paper collection, there were lots of time-consuming phone calls between the Registrar’s office and the departments to decipher unclear handwriting. Now, CSS users keyboard schedules directly into the program and send them electronically to Rivera for review and approval.

Thanks to CSS, hours and hours of tedious paperwork have been eliminated and, we’ll wager, a lot of trees will be saved.

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