To the disappointment of impatient Yalies the world over, University Registrar Jill Carlton said Thursday that, contrary to previous reports, there is no specific date to launch the course listings for the 2010-’11 school year on the Online Course Information system.
But there is still hope for Blue Book-starved Yalies everywhere: The system is expected to go live well before the end of the month, Carlton said.
An assistant in the Registrar’s Office who asked not to be named told the News on Friday that the system would go live on July 15. Carlton, who was out of the office at the time and unavailable for comment, said July 15 had been a target date but was never the system’s intended launch date.
Carlton said the system is still undergoing extensive testing as the Registrar’s Office works to migrate data from the Yale College Publications Office’s new database, which stores the data used to print the physical Blue Book, to the OCI database.
The test results have been largely positive and the course listings for the coming year should go live in the very near future, Carlton said.
“Our tests are going well, but we’d rather be thorough in our testing than be hasty and rush,” she said. “We’re on schedule.”
Course data from the YCPO’s system is stored in a file format distinct from the one used by the Registrar’s Office for course evaluation, registration and grading. Carlton said her office has finished mapping data, and course listings are being exported into OCI, but there are still some kinks to work out.
“If you don’t know who an instructor is going to be or you do know but Yale hasn’t hired them yet, you can’t bring that data into our database,” Carlton said. “So we test. A certain number of instructors didn’t come over because they’re new to Yale.”
Work on the OCI system comes on the heels of a major upgrade to Yale’s Student Information Systems this past weekend, which disabled SIS from Thursday through Monday.
Though Carlton said that overhaul had been on the Registrar’s Office’s calendar and was not directly related to the OCI data migration project, the upgrade has consumed much of her staff’s time and attention as they work to test the system for glitches.
“We have had many conflicting priorities,” Carlton said, “like a student with multiple papers due on the same day.”