Confusion is on the rise about how to use the new MyGCC, and it couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time.
After trying to enroll in classes for the summer session I’m at a loss of how to accomplish what was once an easy task.
Figuring out how to enroll, add and drop classes now requires a “How to for Dummies” book just to decipher the web pages. With a new program come glitches that can only be found through testing, but at a time when the main concern of students is enrolling, familiar territory would have been better.
Afsaneh Abyari, a programmer analyst at GCC, said that the ITS Department is the technical area, but Admission and Records is the department that decides decide what content should be shown on MyGCC.
“It’s to make information more interactive with the students,” said Abyari. “It’s supposed to provide easy access to information and easy control of information.
Anything that we hear about, [like] ‘we can’t log in’ or ‘my username/password doesn’t work,’ we relay that over to admissions and records and they have their own process of handling that. We’re like the car and they’re the driver, we’re building the car for them.”
From my own experience I found that the account was so different, I couldn’t even find the shamefully obvious enrollment date on the first page of the Student Center section. The dramatic changes had me calling a friend to help me find my date and time of enrollment.
On top of having to look for my enrollment date, I then had to click a link to find the time in which I could enroll, because it clearly wasn’t listed beside the date. When the page loaded, a spreadsheet of open enrollment dates by session was shown, but when I viewed the list of times they were all the same. So why not just put it on the first page to begin with? I’ll tell you why, because it would have been too “easy” for us to understand.
A piece of advice to those in charge of the setup and content of MyGCC, would be to have a tutorial image guide option for when students find themselves lost. That way they wouldn’t have to call the school and get redirected to someone who knows how to work through the confusion. Students can then choose to reacquaint themselves with the new system at the own leisure.
Well it looks like the new MyGCC is here to stay, and the time it takes for everyone to become more efficient with it is be but a matter of time. Generally, people don’t accept change willingly because they’re use to the old ways of doing what they know, and are used to. On the other hand, technology is forever changing, so do we adapt or get left behind?