Online Registration Debate - Yea

This year the college introduced a new, simple, easy to use time saving idea-online registration. Yes, no more queuing at the registration offices waiting a painfully long time to register. However, how many of you feel that online registration has lived up to its high expectations? Fair enough the old way did have its problems but once you got over the enormous queue and got to the top of the line, all it took was the bones of an hour and then you were set into another year of education. So why I ask you fix something that isn’t broken? Sure, the majority of the student population managed to get registered without a hitch, but when you think about it, more managed to get registered with no problem the old fashioned way. I ask the people who did manage to register hassle free did it actually save time and was it easier than waiting to get manually registered? I can honestly answer no; it didn’t save time for me. It was tricky enough to grasp the method of how and even after reading it I wasn’t quite sure how it really worked.

Unfortunately I was one of a few who got stuck in a loop in the program, and the only way of resolving this matter was to in the end manually register. It turned out to be long process, possibly even longer than the manual way. Yes I do agree that it may have given more free time to the staff to deal with other queries, such as fees and grants, but honestly, at what cost? Students spending a lengthy amount of time and effort trying to understand the system?

I really do feel that the introduction of online registration system was, when all is said and done, of more benefit to the college than it was to the students. I could believe that the students would have easily waited in a queue to sort the whole thing in an hour. I do understand that being good for the college is not necessarily bad for the students but in this case, it might not have been in the best interests of the students to introduce online registration at this particular time. It was, in my opinion, for the most part a time saving, easily manageable option for the college itself, rather than anything else.