The Pointer UW-Stevens Point Student Newspaper
There is a plan to implement Oracle Campus Solutions, otherwise known as accesSPoint, at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
The features that myPoint has had are gradually becoming accessible only on accesSPoint.
Eventually myPoint, a system which the current UWSP students are familiar with, will be completely phased out.
Jim Barrett, associate vice chancellor for Enrollment Management and chief information officer, described the new system as contemporary.
Some of the features that accesSPoint has or is going to have are course registration capabilities, access to student bills, a tuition calculator and a schedule builder.
A lot of these features were previously accessible on myPoint, but by the end of 2017 all features should be phased into accesSPoint.
According to Barrett, this is the largest software project that has been done on campus in 30 years.
“It’s a significant change on how people do their work and how people live their lives on campus,” Barrett said. “I would say this is the most supportive and engaged group of faculty and staff that I have had to work with on this type of project.”
Though the new system will be beneficial overall, the process of switching has not been without its hurdles.
Anne Eckenrod, associate registrar, said that one of these hurdles was, “converting all of the data and making sure that it’s accurate in the new system. When we converted enrollment data there were over 4 million rows of data.”
Despite some difficulties that the conversion has caused, Eckenrod admitted that she has received positive feedback about the layout of accesSPoint.
Kali Woldt, senior health promotion and wellness major, is a peer advisor for health promotion students.
As a peer advisor, Woldt has had to become familiar with accesSPoint and finds it to be user friendly. However, she said that students have expressed confusion with the system when it comes to receiving department and instructor consent for class registration.
According to Woldt, there are certain classes that have not previously required instructor consent, but now do.
“A lot of the students that I have seen that come in have not used accesSPoint at all, so they were coming in unfamiliar with it,” Woldt said.
Though not all of myPoint’s features are currently accessible on the new system, students can now register for their courses through accesSPoint.
“I feel like it’s easier to use than the one we were using before, just because you can plan all of your courses and put them into a shopping cart before your register,” Woldt said. “It’s just going to take some getting used to, which is why people are having so much trouble with it.”
Caroline Chalk
Reporter
cchal845@uwsp.edu
*A previous version of this article said there were 400 rows of data to be converted. This was corrected on May 4, 2017*
