Enter the RAAP!

They say that desperation is the mother of invention and never was that more true than in the case of the Academic Center for Entering Students (ACES) at the University of Connecticut. Consider this: 6000 students, 6 advisors. All students need to be seen for an academic advising appointment prior to their date to register, and all students are attempting to make appointments during the same period. The time frame is only 8 weeks. Does this sound like a horrendous word problem found only in high school math books? Well, this was the situation every semester for the ACES advisors. Crunching the numbers you realize that completing the task of meeting and advising all the eligible ACES undergraduates, as well as handling the nightmarish level of correspondence with the students, was all but impossible. Since no new staff hirings were on the horizon, the office needed a creative solution to cope with the huge onslaught of students who were simply trying to schedule a meeting with their advisor. Enter the RAAP (Registration Advising Appointment Program)!

The RAAP (www.raap.uconn.edu) is constructed to handle the coordination of appointments for all advisors student caseloads via the Web. Designed by an advisor and a computer science student in the School of Engineering at the University of Connecticut, the RAAP was created to be flexible, user-friendly, and extremely responsive to the needs of an advising office.

The system handles an average of over 8000 transactions per semester (including cancellations and rescheduling) as well as delivering appointment reminder e-mails to undergraduates, tracking student usage, automatically disseminating a satisfaction survey, and keeping track of the location of all actual advising conferences.

So, how does RAAP work? First, being web-based, students can logon to the uncomplicated program from any location with Internet access. After entering RAAP, the student selects her/his advisor, enters some personal information like e-mail address, major, etc., and then selects the time for her/his appointment. Upon clicking the Submit button, the RAAP immediately sends out a confirmation e-mail of the scheduled time and location of the advising meeting. Then, one day before the appointment, the RAAP generates another e-mail reminding the student of his/her appointment, again including the time, date, and location. After the meeting, the RAAP transmits one more communication--an e-mail survey directly to the student's in-basket inquiring about their satisfaction with the advising appointment.

The RAAP breaks down student usage by day/week/month/and total period. This allows advisors to adjust the number of appointments if the need arises. It may be determined that 15 minute time slots should be increased to 20 minutes because of the data provided by the internal reports. Having the ability to generate the appointment roster by the current day, for the future, and the past allows administrators to track trends and plan accordingly.

In addition to simply providing a means for undergraduate ACES students the means to create an online advising appointment, the RAAP grants the administrator the ability to selectively generate messages to students who utilize the site. These messages can target students by specific major or by their semester standing. For example, the ACES staff host meetings that education majors need to attend before they are seen by an advisor. The RAAP furnishes important bulletins about these gatherings to the affected students as they complete the RAAP's online form. Other information can notify targeted majors when they need to declare, list departmental contacts, and which advisor an ACES student should be connecting with.

While the RAAP does not actually advise students, the system does help to reduce the number of missed appointments, increase the contact between advisors and students, and offer immediate feedback for the services provided by the ACES office.