The class of 2010 was the last group of Brown students to have known a time without Banner. Juniors are the last class to have been introduced to advising without the Dean of the College's Advising Sidekick tool. About 80 percent of them applied online, compared to more than 99 percent of this year's freshmen. And with more than 5,000 students now using Banner's new course scheduler tool, it's questionable how many of those freshmen have even heard of Mocha.
After four years, who will be left to remember what being a Brown student was like before these new Web systems came about?
Over the years, critics of technological innovations — most notably Banner — have assailed changes due to the detriment they might cause the New Curriculum and the undergraduate experience at Brown. The Herald took a retrospective look at how these new technological institutions quickly adopted by Brown students have affected student life.
Before Banner
Banner's predecessor for course registration began operating in the fall of 1983, according to University Registrar Robert Fitzgerald. It remained the status quo for more than 20 years until the arrival of Banner in April 2007.
"Students used to line up with the old paper cards," recalled Fitzgerald, who came to the University in 2003. "Back in University Hall, the line used to go all the way through the building."
After students submitted their cards, a data entry firm would pick them up for processing, Fitzgerald said. Students had to wait until the next day to find out what classes they got into.
Fitzgerald said most of Brown's peer group had online registration by the 1990s.
Brown's system was "archaic," he said. "It was like a step back in time for me."
For the most part, the legacy system was written in-house, unlike the packaged Banner software that has been only tweaked by the University for Brown's use. When Banner was first introduced, it used to display zeros for students' grade-point averages on academic records, which was modified when students complained that it looked fishy to employers, he said.
Outside of changes like that and the Brown-built course scheduler, "Banner is pretty vanilla," Fitzgerald said — if Computing and Information Services modified the Banner software too much, upgrades to Banner would become increasingly more cumbersome to implement.
At the time Banner was introduced, the previous mainframe was more than 20 years old. Fitzgerald said the people who built it were no longer around to fix it, and there were few opportunities for upgrades or support for the outdated technology.
"Banner has got its faults, but at least it's stable," Fitzgerald said. "If it ever breaks down, we don't have to go out and find somebody who worked here 15 years ago."
Although the legacy system did not allow for most courses to be filled on a first-come, first-served basis, Fitzgerald said capped writing courses always drew quite the early-morning crowd to University Hall. He said the doors to the building would open at about 5 a.m., and registration for these weary-eyed students would begin around 9 or 10 a.m.
Banner-Brown tensions
A September 2009 Herald editorial summarized the themes of many letters to the editor and news articles around the time Banner replaced the legacy paper system.
"Over the past few years, students and recent alumni have seen paperless pre-registration, and Banner especially, as a threat to the New Curriculum," the editorial concluded. "These concerns will be addressed if and when Brown uses its online resources to support course selections that are flexible and informed."
Years ago, critics prophesied the downfall of Brown's liberal learning curriculum, the introduction of distribution requirements and the uniform application of prerequisites to deny students access to classes they otherwise could have gotten into under a "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
In March of 2007, the Undergraduate Council of Students passed a resolution describing Banner as a "disruptive and counterintuitive" system that would threaten the New Curriculum. A co-sponsor of the resolution condemned Banner as "one of the most impractical applications" introduced at Brown.
Student reactions varied, though.
"As long as there's Mocha, we'll be fine," one student told The Herald at the time.
"I don't think Banner really had the effect people feared it would have," Fitzgerald said. "People shop now as much as they shopped in the '80s."
In the fall of 2009, overrides were introduced to allow students to register for courses that were full — but with the instructor's permission, just like things always were, Fitzgerald said.
And as far as prerequisites go, some departments still ask the Office of the Registrar to tell Banner not to enforce listed prerequisites, which Fitzgerald said can be changed with a click of a button.
With the introduction of the course scheduler, Fitzgerald said he hopes students will have an easier time seeing which courses they do not meet the prerequisites for so they can know to ask for an override.
Banner is designed to enforce distribution requirements, but Fitzgerald said that is a capability his office simply has never used.
"Banner hasn't changed the open nature of the curriculum," he said. "The only thing that has really changed — and I don't think anybody is missing it — is students don't have to line up with pieces of paper anymore."
ASK and Liberal Learning
Though the debates over Banner have been prominent over the past several years, other technological innovations have been reshaping the undergraduate experience as well.
Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron said the Advising Sidekick tool that launched with last year's freshmen will encourage reflection and integrate advising across students' four years at Brown. The tool connects students with their advisers, gathers advising resources in one place and allows students to upload their best work into a portfolio.
"ASK will increase the opportunity for students to live out the promise of the Brown curriculum," Bergeron said. "It's one thing to take courses, but it's another thing to stop and reflect on why."
Before the tool, she said, the liberal learning objectives were not as heavily emphasized to freshmen.
"We say this is a curriculum that encourages reflection," Bergeron said. "This gives us an opportunity to prove that."
Bergeron also said she hopes the tool will evolve with its pilot class of 2013 to integrate advising past students' early years.
This year, sophomores will for the first time file their concentrations through ASK, and those forms will be housed in the program, Bergeron said. Previously, students' files resided in paper form in University Hall, which she said was a hindrance to concentration advisers.
But with ASK, Bergeron hopes to see everything from students' goals and introductory letters for first-year advisers to concentration essays go into one electronic file that is easily accessible, even when a student switches advisers after declaring a concentration. Just as importantly, she said, a student's electronic file is also accessible to the student.
"There's a great opportunity here for rethinking what that file is," Bergeron said. "We want students to feel like the continuity of advising takes place over all four years."
MyCourses and alternatives
Before Brown adopted the Blackboard-based MyCourses system in 2002, the University had what CIS's Manager for Instructional Technology Patricia Zudeck called a "homegrown" learning management system that was hard to support or extend.
Course packets sold by the Brown Bookstore containing assigned readings were very common for classes, but hard to update once they were printed and frequently misp
laced by students, Zudeck said.
Now, Web-based software has allowed students around-the-clock access to online assignments and assessments as well as the opportunity to view their grades online, among other features.
About 600 courses use MyCourses, but Zudeck said other platforms are becoming increasingly common as students expect more resources to be online. Some courses use wikis, Google sites or iTunes U.
Though iTunes U can support video as well as audio, its use is becoming increasingly common for hosting audio files for language or music classes, according to Brown's Director for Academic Technology Services Catherine Zabriskie. Faculty can request space on iTunes U from the University, and can grant access to the files only to students registered for their class, just as they would through MyCourses.
One problem with many of these systems has been their inability to interact with Banner. Though course registration lists are transferred to MyCourses nightly, grades entered by professors in MyCourses cannot be transferred to Banner.
With the recent launch of a new and very different Blackboard system, Zudeck said CIS has begun to assess alternative learning management systems and hopes to reach a decision this spring. One of many options under consideration is Luminis, which could be more easily integrated into the rest of the suite because it is made by the same company as Banner.
But John Spadaro, Brown's director of technical architecture and outreach, said it is unlikely Brown will flock to one central system of record. Instead, the focus is on making sure these various systems — from Banner to ASK to MyCourses — can interact in some way with one another.
"Particularly as we modernize systems, one of the things we try to do is make sure we have very open programming interfaces so we can exchange data between systems," Spadaro said. "The hope is even if it's not the same system, the data in one system will be able to be used or referenced easily by others."
