The Daily’s Meredith Moriak sat down with Vice President of Enrollment and Registrar Matt Hamilton to talk about challenges students may face while enrolling through oZONE and to learn about public forums being hosted by the project team.

Q: Why are public forums being hosted and what is the purpose of them?

A: When students have been out there looking for classes early and they’ve accessed the system ... we have received comments, because it is clearly different. It’s a change and this is our first chance to get it out there. ...We’ve listened to the students, we understand their concerns, we know that it doesn’t have the look and feel of the system that we previously have had. We also of course know that there are some positives to the system. ... We decided we could do a better job to try and get out there to meet the students face to face...show them a demo ... but we really wanted to be a little bit more personal ... invite them to a venue that is pretty easily accessible ... and to basically show what we have. ... This isn’t the end product, but it will require an evolution similar to the one we had with enroll.ou.edu.

Q: How does the oZONE project team feel about the problems students may encounter?

A: We know change is hard and we know that there is some functionality that, at least initially, we aren’t going to have. We do understand it is more difficult and had there been any way to make it more robust to begin with, we would have. ... We are committed to continuing to make enhancements on this system.

Q: How does the oZONE team believe enrollment will go?

A: We will do our best to make this a successful enrollment. I think that it will be, but I do expect a little more confusion than in the past. I expect it will take a little more time. It won’t look like it has in the past, but we’ll continue to work toward positive solutions.

Q: What improvements are planned for the enrollment portion of oZONE?

A: Very early in this process, we engaged SunGard Higher Education (the company who built the site) to see if we could put some of the functionality in. SunGard has actually been working with some of our ideas for all of their clients and we believe that sometime next year, they will roll out their trial schedule. This will obviously be for all of their clients that choose to do that upgrade, but we’re optimistic ... that’ll be one of the improvements that we attempt to make through this.

Q: Will the enroll.ou.edu Web site still be accessible after spring 2010 for students to create trial schedules?

A: After this year, it’s really likely that we won’t have the ability to support that. We hope that the new trial schedule that SunGard is working on will be available, obviously within the next year, but I can’t make a promise that, the (enroll.ou.edu) trial schedule would be around after this period. The reason that it’s up right now is because for any enrollment changes that actually occur during the fall, that is the system of record, and so you continue to use that system for anything that is related to the current enrollment. ... That’s why you see it still up. It will be unlikely due to the computer system changes that we will continue to leave that up.

Q: Are the stops shown in trial schedules on the enroll.ou.edu Web site accurate and should students count on them to reflect the truth?

A: Some of the information in the old system may not relate to the spring semester enrollment issues. It’s fine for the student to use the trial schedule, but I wouldn’t necessarily rely on that to be completely accurate for spring.