Bailey Thompson | News Editor

While students may not think very much about the way that they find their classes on a daily basis, a significant percentage of Western students became upset when they learned that the Real-Time Class Availability feature had been removed from Western’s Portal.

Noticing this frustration among students, the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Kathy Cassity, turned to Honors Program Director Gavin Keulks to get a feel for student approval or disapproval for the new system along with why.

“Our registrar’s office works extraordinarily hard to develop or reimagine processes for everyone’s benefit,” said Keulks, acknowledging the effort that went into the new scheduling system.

With that said, however, Keulks also noted that the way students responded to the new system was primarily negative.

“I think their intentions were in the right place with this change, but the regular real-time availability function is beloved by students, well formatted and easy to use, so that made changing it harder than anticipated,” said Keulks.

After sending out a survey at Dean Cassity’s request, 83.3% of students surveyed indicated that they either “strongly disapproved” or “disapproved” of the new system, citing ease of use, speed and layout as their primary reasons for disliking the new system.

With this information in hand, Amy Clark, the University Registrar, shared the news with students via email on April 30 that they would now have both options to choose from.

“The Real-Time Schedule View is back by popular demand,” said Clark.

Having delivered this update, Clark then shared with students some of the benefits that using the new system could have, if they were willing to learn the different format. With the new system, students can use the enhanced search feature to find classes based on location, instructional method, course attribute, title, days of the weeks, start and end times and/or credit hours.

Both of these options are now available for students to use on Western’s website.

Contact the author at howlnews@wou.edu