Cunyfirst Hands-On Informational Meetings for Departmental Administrative Staff

CUNYfirst Hands-on Informational Meetings for Departmental Administrative Staff

Seven small groups meetings across all five schools to be held between Feb 5 and Feb 15

*** Handout (version: Feb 7) ***

General information about CUNYfirst at Hunter: http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/cunyfirst (site under development)

CUNYfirst login page (“production”): https://home.cunyfirst.cuny.edu/ (this is site were you should have claimed your account – see message from VP Zinnanti on Dec 19, 2012 -- and which some of you are currently using for “workload” and searches)

What lies ahead – assuming there is no “abortion” (“Go – No go” decision expected around Feb 20, 2013):

 March 25, 2013: SIMS will become unavailable

 April 2013: CUNYfirst/Campus Solutions (Student Records) will go live

o Students will register via CS (no more eSIMS) for both summer 2013 and fall 2013 (exact dates to be determined, not before mid-April, alternatives for summer registration under consideration)

o Faculty advisors will grant permissions to register via CS (rather than in SIMS)

o All faculty will have to enter textbook information for summer and fall 2013 via CS (rather than via the “Informed Registration” site)

 May 2013:

o Faculty will have to submit grades for spring 2013 and beyond via CS (rather than via webgrade)

o Faculty will have to get class rosters for summer 2013 and beyond via CS (rather than via webroster; maybe photoroster will still be available)

Complicating factors

 Adoption of new general education requirement (”Pathways”). New freshmen and new transfer students will not have a choice, currently enrolled students have to make a decision to “opt in” or “opt out”.

 Hunter will have to switch to the central DegreeWorks (“DIG”) implementation; DegreeWorks has to be updated to include “Pathways”.

 Hence, undergraduate advising will be much more complex.

Role of Departmental Administrative Staff

 First line (“down the hallway”) support for their faculty helping with tasks faculty should be able to do themselves

 Performing certain tasks (like retrieving/printing class rosters) for (some of) their faculty as “superusers” (in the current system)

Therefore,

… you are the first to learn about how things will be done in CUNYfirst before we reach out to the faculty at large. Today’s meeting is just a start, there will be more information and training for Departmental Administrative Staff as well as for all faculty. The main agenda item for today is to give you some “hands-on” experience using a “simulation environment”. CUNYfirst login page (“simulation”): https://cnyeptst.cunyfirst.cuny.edu (this is a “get acquainted” site with course and student data rolled over from SIMS)

Things to keep in mind about the “simulation environment”:

 You need to claim your account separately, but following exactly the same steps as with the “production” environment. I strongly suggest that you use a different password; the username will be the same.

 It contains real data -- both your own personal data (including SSN, salary, and date of birth) and actual enrollment data for students from fall 2012 and earlier.

o Never share your password with anyone, not even with your best friend. She/he will not steal your identity, but she/he may not be as careful as you are.

o Keep all FERPA requirements in mind, treat the data with the same care as if working in SIMS.

 In contrast to the production environment, the simulation environment can only be reached from a computer with a Hunter IP address (a desktop at Hunter or a laptop using hunternet).

 You will continue to have to access after this introductory session; and we expect it to be available for training purposes through the spring semester

 Not everything works as well as it should at this point; there are limitations. We are working on improving this simulation environment. CUNY will “refresh” the site using data more recently ported from SIMS, but a number of shortcomings will remain and not be fixed before we go live in April.

 Recommended browsers: Internet Explorer on Win, Firefox on Mac

In addition to logging in with your own credentials (username and password) and having access to particular features as determined by your “role” and associated “rights”, you can also explore how CUNYfirst/Campus Solutions works from a student point of view. To do this, use any of the following five (fake) student identities:

Student1.Hunter76 Welcome123! Student2.Hunter77 Welcome123! Student3.Hunter78 Welcome123! Student4.Hunter79 Welcome123! Student5.Hunter80 Welcome123!

You will be able to search for courses and simulate registration for spring 2013 (however, the simulation environment mimics an ideal world where every course you want is available and there are no restrictions) as well as access your unofficial transcript. – While you are not students, it helps to get a better understanding of the whole CUNYfirst system to look at it from a student point of view as well.

The Central CUNYfirst information and support site: http://cuny.edu/about/administration/offices/CIS/CUNYfirst.html# includes step-by-step instructions for Faculty/Advisor Self-Service and Student Self-Service.

Working with CUNY first requires learning new terms. Here are three crucial pieces of information:

 A SIMS to CUNYfirst transition glossary

 A list of acronyms identifying the CUNY colleges, e.g., “Hunter College” (the academic institution) is “HTR01”  Terms (like fall 2012) are 4-digit codes: The first digit is always “1”, the second and third digits are the year (e.g., “09”, “12”, “13”), the fourth digit is the month (like “2” for February, the spring term, “6” for June/summer, “9” for September/fall). So, fall 2012 = 1129 and spring 2013 = 1132.

An electronic version of this handout is available at http://maxweber.hunter.cuny.edu/~mkuechle/cf