The new system allows undergraduate students to schedule academic advising and tutoring sessions online.
The Symplicity Insight application has been Emoryized as the Advising and Support Scheduling Tool (ASST), pronounced, “assist”.
Below is an article that Steve Savage (Emory College Office of Undergraduate Education) wrote as a promotion for the new system in January 2014:
“As the name suggests, the new system allows undergraduate students to schedule academic advising and tutoring sessions online. The same company behind Emory’s job search tool, Eagle Ops, powers ASST.
Before ASST was implemented, the College depended on the legacy systems AdvisorTrac and TutorTrac systems to schedule academic advising appointments and tutoring sessions, respectively. These systems were not advanced enough to meet the needs of Emory’s network of students, and even shut down for an extended period of time.
For example, the National Scholarships and Fellowships program plans to use ASST to create event sign-ups for student workshops regarding scholarships and fellowships. That way, students will be able to register for events through a school platform, rather than through Facebook or other social media outlets.
Convenience, in particular, characterizes the new system. In the past, students needed to make appointments in person, by e-mail or over phone; these methods not only were time consuming, but also made finding a suitable time difficult. ASST, which contains a handy “calendar” function, allows students to look up available times for the program they plan to make an appointment for and then add the appointment to their calendar. The system makes signing up for appointments and events quick and easy, which caters to the busy college students it serves.
Since ASST incorporates such a wide range of undergraduate programs. “As students use the system, we hope that they might discover other types of resources available to them in the College that they may not have been aware of.
The team at the Office for Undergraduate Education and I hope the highly functional ASST system will encourage students to actively take advantage of the many advising, tutoring and academic programs Emory College has to offer.”
As part of the project, we worked with Wade Sanner (Purchasing Dept.) to consolidate a number of the various Symplicity contracts across the campus, and we also reduced the amount of annual fees for these contracts.
Participating Departments: Emory College – Office of Undergraduate Education, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, LITS Middleware and Web, Emory University Purchasing, LITS Project Management Office.