How do people feel about the Highlander Hub so far?
As the Highlander Hub’s debut semester ends, opinions on the platform’s performance are mixed, both with faculty and students. After 20 years of using Self-Service, the decision was made to make the switch to a new platform, with the hopes of creating an enhanced and more accessible experience for its users.
Although its first steps have been shaky, the Hub continues to show promise and has the vote of confidence from most people on campus.
When asked about their experience with The Hub so far, professors shared that there are differences between the experience of using it as a faculty member and as a student.
Dr. Gabie Kerr, associate professor of management at MC is very pleased with the impact it has had on her advisees. “I think the student interface is fantastic. I feel like more students are actually registering on time [now],” Kerr said.
“I think that the student’s experience is prettier. I like that they can just drop classes into a schedule and we don’t have that overlap,” added Dr. Sarah Clinton, associate professor of Finance.
Although they are happy with the student side of it, there seem to be a lot more problems working with it for teachers and advisors.
“The faculty’s experience has not been as smooth, but we are getting there. I think we’ve had some training and some resources to help, but it’s still not as easy for us to navigate as the old system,” said Clinton.
“There have been some headaches on the advisor side. I feel like we’ve had to be on a student’s computer to show them how to do things because it’s so much easier on their side,” added Dr. Kerr.
Although the teachers were much more comfortable with self-service, they do believe that The Hub will eventually equal and surpass it given enough time.
“[Self Service] was a little bit easier for me, but because we knew the system. I feel like this is gonna be able to eventually do everything we want to do. We’ve just had a little bit of hiccups here and there, trying to work out the kinks,” said Kerr. “Change is always difficult anyway, to be honest with you. I just wish that as an institution we were communicating a touch more about how we can use it and the expectations so that way we knew what the students were seeing on their end,” she added.
While the student side of things has been working better than the teachers’, there are still some issues that have arisen with the platform in general which have affected both students and faculty.
The platform would sometimes freeze and even shut down, forcing users to restart the whole program. There were also problems with certain bits of information regarding upcoming courses and personal academics that would not be shown on the platform. For example, testing out of certain core requirements is not accounted for in the system, which results in it telling people that they are missing more things than they are, explained Kayana Donegan (‘27).
“Some of the courses are missing, [the platform] is pretty easy to navigate, but in terms of if all the classes are in there and if they’re in there correctly, I don’t know if it’s a registrar issue, but my experience has not been great so far,” she added.
Ben Howard, director of the IT department and project manager for the Highlander Hub addressed these problems.
“When it first came online, there were some performance issues. The Hub is not running on our servers. It’s a cloud application and during testing, we didn’t run into any of the performance problems we saw, but I’ve been working closely with the company it runs on to get those smoothed out and make sure that it’s always running smoothly from here on out,” he said.
Regarding the delay with registration, he mentioned that it was not a problem with The Hub itself, but rather some scheduling issues that the administration had.
When it comes to individual student information and courses, he admitted that there have been a lot of small issues that had to be fixed along the way to make sure that everything is being taken into account.
“A lot of the project and a lot of the process was about moving data from our really old systems into the new system, and that was a huge year-long undertaking, and then when you start running through the new processes, running new reports, you find places where things aren’t linking up the way that you thought they would or it’s calculating slightly differently and you have to go in and tweak it to make sure that it’s calculating it correctly. So the data is all there and it made it over, but getting it to every possible scenario with every student’s individual situation and all the different types of credits and courses they took and transfers and once you start setting eyes on those, you can see where little things need to be adjusted and tweaked, so those have kind of been the biggest challenges so far,” he said.
The ultimate goal for Howard is to make The Hub a one-stop shop that has everything a student needs. Whether it be a student form, or getting in contact with someone, the Highlander Hub has the ambition to be the one place where you can find everything regarding Maryville College.