Housing forms find a new home

In order to return to school the following semester,  every returning student must complete a number of forms, one of these being the student housing form that students receive in their Norwich mailboxes.

The paper housing form used to be turned in to either the corps housing office or the residence life office, where it was filed and then staff like Iphagainia Tanguay had to sort and enter the data into a spreadsheet for use.

This tedious process is changing for the upcoming 2012 fall semester.

"For the first time, we will have the ability for students to go into their banner web accounts and complete the fall 2012 housing form online," said Tanguay, director of residence life. "This will then eliminate the paper component that's been the norm."

Tanguay said that the residence life office and housing office have been working hard with the office of information technology (IT) to get the housing form online and make the process simpler for everyone involved.

In the past, the information was taken off the paper form and transferred to an Excel spread sheet, Tanguay explained. The conversion from paper to electronic entry will change the process from being very manual to being a little simpler, said Kristine Seipel, the adjutant and housing officer.

"It's going to be easier for students to access, because it will be on banner web," Seipel said. "They don't have to worry about it getting lost or misplaced; this will eliminate someone's form being lost."

This on-line system will also eliminate having to run to the different offices to get the form or turn it in, and students will not have to wait to get it through their Norwich mailbox, Seipel said.

The online housing form "started with promoting self-service banner, for students," said Joseph Morvan, director of information technology. "What spearheaded that was on-line registration, once on-line registration was promoted, then it started to come down to what other options could be offered to students."

Morvan added that on-line registration started a chain reaction that set off the start of the on-line emergency notification, FERPA, missing student system, and now the housing form.

The on-line housing forms were scheduled to kick off for spring 2012 enrollment, but "paper forms were already crafted prior to launching, and now went to housing forms for the fall enrollment," Morvan said.

"The on-line housing form for the fall semester is more complex," adds Jerome Hatch, a programming analyst.

Morvan agreed, stating that there are more students, more categories and more changes than for the spring semester.

"Hopefully it will be a more user-friendly way for students to complete (the student housing form), and also more user-friendly from our point of view in consolidating it, knowing who's completed it, who hasn't, and what their preferences are, in a more efficient and timely manner," Tanguay said.

Once the online form is complete, the information is automatically consolidated into a spread sheet for the residence life office and the housing office, which can then use that information, added Tanguay.

"We have been working on it since last fall, around October or so, worked on it quite a lot over winter break, and since sometime in January it's been in the testing phase," Seipel said.

Other universities may already have such things on-line for their students to access, and she said Norwich, like many schools, wants to make the academic process less difficult any way it can,

"I think it will be easier for our students because I think most of our students are more in-tune with technology these days," Seipel said.

Putting the housing form on-line not only benefits the students, but also the housing office and residence life office by keeping the paperwork to a minimum.

"There will still be some work that we need to do because we have to do certain analysis with the data that comes in," she said. "There's going to be less time being consumed sorting through the data."

The IT department was approached by the commandant's office in July of 2011, to put together an "arrival package" on-line. This effort consisted of financial aid consent, missing persons, commuter address, FERPA consent, and ROTC Norwich consent, Morvan said.

Putting the housing form on-line came after the initial package in a later enhancement to the "arrival package."

When a project is proposed for the IT department, there is first a scope meeting between the "requester" and the "programmer." This meeting is designed to talk about what has to be done towards accomplishing the project, Morvan explained.

"Secondly we see what services are readily available within the system. There's an analysis and review of existing systems," he said. "To see what's currently being used, if anything."

Morvan added that after the discovery phase, a template or draft is made up, which is then shown to the requester to make sure that everything is going according to plan.

From there the project goes through a series of tests to get approved by the requester and then goes through the system's approval process to gauge the efficiency, Morvan said.

"We do a lot of testing ourselves before we go to the requester to test, but we don't know all the situations – you know there are 2,000 students, we try to catch everything," Hatch said.

Morvan adds that the housing form will have a different impact on the Norwich system compared to the on-line registration, because registration has time constraints based on dates and times within certain segments of the population.

"Prior to filling it out or even after, we encourage students to still come back and ask questions, or correct any information that may have changed," Tanguay said. "We don't want to lose the part where students can come and talk to us if they have concerns."