Notice Board

The Banner Revitalization project teams are busy pushing forward with the project.  But what does all that entail?

Kathleen Willms, Assistant Registrar, is heading up the curriculum management services team—the business unit responsible for the curriculum conversion and working alongside the Student Information Systems (SIS) staff. She says when the Registrar’s Office began to use the Banner SIS in the early 1990s, it had a revolutionary impact on the reporting of students’ academic information.

“Data previously held on what was then Permanent Record Cards was entered into the student system creating a digital record of the paper-based information. The original software was designed to use numeric values to represent the various pieces of information including academic programs, majors and faculties,” says Willms.

“As we move forward with Banner Revitalization, updated versions will allow us to migrate historical numeric-based information to alphabetical representations that will be more intuitive and provide transparency to the average user. As an example, under the current system a Bachelor of Arts degree is represented by the numeric value 1. Moving forward the BA will be represented with the letters BA.  It is extremely exciting to know that as we continue to remove local adaptations, new features and enhancements will become available for the benefit of the student, as well as institutional stakeholders, ultimately improving service and efficiency.”

Throughout the curriculum conversion portion of the project, Willms says the Ellucian consultant commented repeatedly about the complexity of the University of Lethbridge curriculum.  “Mapping the basic codes alone meant creating over 16,000 new program code combinations.”

Read more about the Banner Revitalization project on the Blog site.