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Enter the RAAP!
Matt Morano
Assistant Director, ACES
University of Connecticut
Student Affairs Online: Fall 2002 • Vol. 3, No. 4
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.
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