Populi Project Plan

We are excited about the possibilities of what we can achieve, most importantly, how we can better serve our students.  The new system will provide us with a more robust way of managing academics, admissions, courses, programs, the bookstore, and will give us more detailed reporting.  And for our students, it will provide them with a clearer, real-time view, of their academic achievements.

Project Information

Working Group: M. Gray, T. Beach, D. Kiff, M. Vanderboom, C. Schoenmaker, R. Shouldice.

Launch date: July 7st, 2016

Contacts: Nick Holloway [nick@populi.co], Mark Ackerman [mark@populi.co]

General Process

  • Decision to go ahead with Populi.
  • Give database to Mark Ackerman who performs initial import.
  • Review data structure and tweaking import script.
  • Determine feature list for each department.
  • Working Group gets familiar with interface and functionality.
  • Initial training during May and June with basic scenarios/tasks.
  • Working Group continues to get familiar with interface and functionality.
  • Import fresh data and make William read-only.
  • Go Live July 7th.
  • Set up Populi for Production use.
  • Further training.
  • Mass email to students at beginning of August.

Schedule

  • Staff Training – May 19th, 10:00am to 12:00pm.
  • Faculty Training – May 19th, 1:00pm to 3:00pm.
  • Training Make Up Day – May 25th, 10:00am to 12:00pm.
  • Go Live – July 7th.
  • Student Go Live – Late July or Early August.

Helpful Links

Departments

Advancement

Bookstore

  • Bookstore
  • Heritage Gear
  • Externally accessible URL
  • Charge to account
  • One-time purchase

Cafeteria

  • Meal plan balances tracked separately from AR balances.
  • Reports
    • Sales Report
    • Account Balances, everyone
    • Journal entries
    • Daily cash totals
  • Edit Accounts
  • Edit Items
  • Incorporate Populi Meal Plan functionality
  • Use Alerts or a Custom Field in the Student’s profile to communicate the remaining balance.
  • Use setCustomField function to update the student’s balance.
  • New Features
    • Quantity button
    • General improvements to touchscreen workflow.  Bigger touchscreen or more items on screen.
    • Other forms of payment like debit or credit.

Faculty

  • Create mailing lists of email addresses.
  • Check and email class rosters.
  • Input grades.
  • Input attendance.
  • For Assessments.  Be able to access all the grades for all the courses. i.e. the breakdown of how the prof got to the final grade.
  • Faculty Advising Procedure.

Finance

  • General Ledger and List of Accounts
  • Invoice students for courses, meal plans, books, residence fees.
  • Invoice 3rd parties for conferences and rentals.
  • Receive donations/receipting for donations.
  • Create deposits.
  • Issue refunds to students for things that are billed for.
  • Track student account balances.
  • Apply interest to account balances.
  • Track payment plans.
  • Issue tax receipts beyond the donation ones.
  • Financial Aid
    • Track students who have applied for OSAP.
    • Track communications with OSAP on student’s behalf.
    • Record and apply loan and grant amounts (done on a school year basis).

Registrar

  • Register students in courses (allow students to pre-register themselves into courses)
  • Perform course changes as necessary – and have this function on lock-down for the Registrar’s office only (Sandi, Karyn, Theresa)
  • Input grades (faculty input grades, Registrar’s office changes grades as necessary)
  • Calculate semester GPA and AGPA for each student, and separate between college and seminary studies
  • Track program history, including transfer credit and advanced standing credit and substitution and test-out courses on a program/degree audit
    • Program sheets
      • Faculty and Registrar uses these.  Registrar edits, faculty read them for information purposes.
      • Working copy of a program sheet.  i.e. something we can manipulate without committing.
      • Possible Solutions:
        • Export from Populi with data formatted for importing into the current excel sheet
        • New solution that does away with the excel sheets.
  • Input and track detailed information about transfer credits and advanced standing credit
  • Track academic warning, probation, suspension and support
  • Allow the Registrar to do work-ups for program changes, without making the change occur before it is approved
  • Keep all application documents, including references and transcripts, on file
  • Produce transcripts, official and unofficial
  • Maintain contact information, legal name, and current address
  • Maintain statistical data (marriage, citizenship, denomination, age, etc.)
  • Generate a number of different reports and queries for reports: for example, the board stats/enrollment report, the ABHE report, KPI reporting.

Meeting Notes