CaneLink approaches final stages of completion

While class registration for the spring semester begins Monday, students and advisers still face problems with CaneLink.

CaneLink was created to provide an organized system for tasks such as choosing classes and keeping track of students’ academic requirements. The university switched to CaneLink in the spring.

Even though time has passed since CaneLink was launched, students like senior Kaitlyn Rancour have had trouble finding their degree audit (ACE). The ACE shows the courses needed for graduation and fulfillment for the major.

“I have not found the ACE on CaneLink,” she said. “What I’ve found is more like a check-off kind of thing. You have to find it based on what you need for graduation.”

Graduation requirements also did not transfer well from the previous myUM system onto CaneLink. It does not acknowledge requirements that Rancour already met.

“Everything is pretty much there, it’s just you have to really search through it all, and it’s kind of confusing,” Rancour said.

New students are also having trouble navigating CaneLink’s intricacies. It took freshman Joey Bonner several attempts at navigating the website before getting the hang of CaneLink.

“I had difficulty finding the different links that would actually help me to plan my schedule,” he said. “It was a little bit difficult figuring out how to use all the tools, but once I figured it out, it was pretty straight forward.”

Students and advisers agree that CaneLink becomes more efficient with continued practice.

Samuel Terilli, a journalism and media management professor in the School of Communication, feels that the system’s users as well as its providers are responsible for understanding new technologies.

“Part of the issue with CaneLink is the same issue with any new technology or any new system,” he said. “It takes not only the user’s time to adapt to it … but it also takes the provider or administrator’s time to understand how it’s going to actually work.”

Terilli faced glitches when he tried to post mid-term grades. Many other faculty members had the same problem, leading to confusion on the part of professors and students who wanted to access their grades.

Terilli attributes the system’s issues to the university’s decision to accelerate the start date of CaneLink.

According to Lori Shipley, the executive director for the Student Information System (SIS), numerous resources like an FAQ section and video tutorials are available to assist students and advisers.

The tutorials are detailed for the specific user, meaning advisers have a different set of instructions from students or faculty.

Scott Ingold, the functional team lead of SIS’s CaneLink team, said a student guide detailing the CaneLink system was available to students during the registration period last year.

“We communicated with the students, and we sent out a communication to the advisers and faculty,” Ingold said.

Rancour found the shopping cart feature to be useful. The shopping cart allows her to select her classes before officially registering Monday.

“It’s so much more simple than it was in the old system,” she said.

As the system is in its final stages of being completed, students can expect to receive an email regarding FAQ information, steps on how to find their degree progress reports and instructions on finding and calculating their cumulative grade point average.