The Accessible Campus Online Resource Network (ACORN) service designed to replace U of T’s ROSI is set to make its debut in mid-June after more than a year of development. The new service, designed and implemented by Next Generation Student Information Services (NGSIS) is one of the largest information technology projects ever undertaken at the University of Toronto.
Cathy Eberts, director of solutions at NGSIS, says that ACORN will replace ROSI after a transition period of approximately six months, during which time students will have access to either interface.
According to the website for ACORN, the new web service aims to provide redesigned and enhanced course enrolment tools. For instance, they propose an enrolment cart that allows for students to save courses and enrol in them at a later date. They also offer a search function that incorporates both courses and programs. This function enables users to search for courses by code or keyword, and yields autocomplete results after four characters. Links to UTmail+ and library services will also be a part of the new service, but may not be available in time for its summer launch.
A long-standing complaint about ROSI is its scheduled downtime, an issue that the move to ACORN cannot solve, as the two services use the same technology; however, Eberts reports that the number of available service hours for ROSI and ACORN will increase with the launch of the new system and that regularly scheduled downtime will be on Mondays from 3:00 – 6:00 am. Eberts says that additional outages to accommodate large system or database upgrades will be required occasionally and will typically be scheduled on a Friday evening or weekend.
Engineering student Russell Todd looks forward to the changes. “I have been dealing with the bugs and chunkiness of ROSI for the past couple years and I am very excited they are upgrading. From what I have gathered about the upgrade to ACORN, it seems that the developers are focused on the user interface and usability of the product,” he says.
Todd hopes that ACORN will address the capacity problems that ROSI has, which cause the site to crash when a large number of students try to use the service all at once, often interfering with course enrolment. “The main problem with ROSI is all the little bugs and crashes that happened especially around the time when students were adding courses. I would be extremely disappointed if these bugs were not fixed in ACORN,” Todd adds.
Rosealea Thompson, an OISE alumna, says that she had no issues with ROSI during her time at U of T, but that she would like to see an improvement with the U of T mail service. “[Accessing] my webmail was frustrating and led to miscommunication. Hopefully ACORN will present a more user-friendly interface in this regard,” she says.
Jay Nyandak, a fourth-year economics and information technology student at U of T, says he has had no real problems with ROSI and that he finds it “pretty functional the way it is.” He did, however, have difficulty enrolling in a tutorial recently and described the course enrolment process as only “okay”. Adding “I hope they don’t make it so user-friendly that it’s counter-productive. I think that’s a problem with a lot of websites now.”
Over 1,000 students have participated in the development of ACORN through interviews, focus groups, surveys, and beta tests. According to Eberts, future versions of ACORN will include enhanced functionality, a redesigned student finances section, and a mobile app.
