A few weeks ago the spring 2015 class registration period began. Students anxiously logged into BU Brain, jostling to sign up for classes that would get their majors and degrees finished on time. But the BU Banner system malfunctioned, and students were unable to login for several hours.
In the following weeks, the system crashed over and over again, leaving students even more stressed and irritated. Registration is already a nerve-wracking process, and the University’s failure to properly respond to these glitches placed unnecessary additional stress on students.
Most importantly, students were unable to register for courses during their designated time slots. For students approaching graduation, this is unacceptable. For students with strict major requirements, this is equally unacceptable. Some students with work and class commitments lacked the flexibility to patiently refresh BU Brain. As a result, these students registered later than peers with the same time slot.
One way to solve this would have been to freeze registration, a strategy that can be employed in the future if this ever happened again. It would mean moving everyone’s time slots over — perhaps for a few days — until the system could be repaired. That way, the integrity of the current time slot system could be maintained, and students wouldn’t have to worry about more people being able to register for classes they need to take.
The crashes are allegedly caused by too many students logging onto the servers simultaneously. This past summer, ITS load tested the Banner system and determined the network could withstand the predicted level of student traffic. In reality, this was not the case.
To ensure future registration periods run smoothly, the network infrastructure must be improved. If that isn’t feasible, perhaps the University should invest in an outside server, a method employed by businesses and organizations across the country. These third-party networks of redundant servers are specifically designed to handle large volumes of traffic. Ellucian, the software company that develops Banner, offers a cloud computing platform, Ellucian Cloud, that is used by universities to host their Banner deployment.
If the University lacks the funds or expertise to improve the network infrastructure, further staggering registration times could help reduce Banner traffic during peak registration periods. At present, there are two separate time periods for each day during registration period. These days could be divided into five or six time slots. With an out-dated system, this may be the only way to keep pace with a growing student population.
Students attempting to look up classes to design schedules in advance could not do so at convenient times due to crash. The crash even hurt students meeting with advisers. Already short-staffed, advisers found it difficult to run audits for students due to the systems crash. Limited adviser accessibility and registration crashes coalesced to make this the most stress-inducing registration period in recent memory.
These problems are even scarier as the University continues to balloon in size. It’ll be hard to have 20,000 students in 2020 if they can’t sign up for their classes.