Edition 2 2021

Welcome to all of the new recipients of the Student Management System (SMS) newsletter. From October 4 2021, our staff and students will get new and improved user experiences across the student lifecycle.

The new SMS is a transformational technology project for Western, not a ‘like-for-like swap’ of Callista for a different system.  You’ll be able to do all the things you currently do in Callista and Discoverer, but the ways you do those things will change.

One of the project’s main goal is to make this transition for our students as seamless as possible. This is why we have been involving student representatives to assure that their voices are heard with how they can easily transition to the new SMS.

Employing Student Casuals in the project

We hired two work experience students late last year in support of the initiative from the Office of Employability and Graduate Success.  We selected Ciaran Morgan and Manuja Chadha from their shortlist of candidates and we have helped them gain some project & change management experience. But more importantly, they have helped us with their work on:

  • designing the communication and engagement plan for our students
  • analysing the changes needed to WSU webpages to lessen student confusion when the new SMS comes in
  • providing feedback to the new MySR, Degree Audit and guided registration
  • helping with data clean up efforts to assure that resulting will work effectively after Go-Live.

Surveying students about the structure of the new MySR

MySR which currently gets all of its data from Callista will change dramatically after October 4 2021. To help us design the structure, terminologies, functionalities and user experience of the new MySR, we showed a wireframe of the new MySR in a survey. Thanks to the help of the Office of Strategic Insights & Analysis, we received feedback from over 70 students.

Student data

The data showed that a large majority of the students agreed that:

·       the presentation of the elements make sense (93%)

·       they can easily find information that they need (89%)

·       the profile shows all of the necessary information and links (87%)

They have also indicated that they would prefer to hear about these changes through:

·       an announcement on the WSU landing page

·       an announcement from vUWS

·       email or social media channels

Asking students to test the guided registration process

From this pool of participants, 8 volunteers tested the new guided registration process developed by the SMS Team. They were given test login details to go through the whole guided registration process as if they were new students who would receive their offers after October 4 2021. Our testers agreed that:

·       the order of the steps made sense

·       the directions were clear

·       they were able to complete the steps in one go – no errors and within 20 minutes

Here are some comments we received from our student testers:

“Very simplistic overview and user friendly going through all the options. Clear prompts when steps were not complete or incorrectly filled out. Very easy to understand language, to avoid confusion.”

“The layout was simple and made it easy to follow the steps without losing track of what information you needed or where it needed to go.”

“Helpful in making registration user friendly and quick”

Calling on your students!

If you have students who would be interested at giving us their feedback on key elements of the new SMS, email us now and we will get in touch with you.

Using a WSU student’s work to engage fellow students about the change

The Practice Adoption team collaborated with the School of Humanities & Communication Arts to ask one of their recent graduates to produce a video for the project. The aim of this video was to catch the attention of our students to raise their awareness on the changes coming their way. The result is this great video made by Gewargis Davidoff, enjoy and we hope you can help us spread the word to your students.

SMS

Let us know if there’s an SMS topic or feature you’d like to hear more about and we will include it in the next edition of the newsletter.

Contact us anytime at: smsproject@westernsydney.edu.au