For the first time, students at St. Edward’s University registered for classes using a new system, myHilltop. Previously, students registered through EdWeb.

MyHilltop will soon completely replace the old system and will be exclusively used to access a variety of services, including registration, billing and financial services, meal plan and housing options.

“In order to provide support for years to come, it was critical that we move away from the old system associated with EdWeb and move forward with a more modern solution that could support the global university that St. Edward’s has become,” Office of Information Technology project manager Claire Dunn said. “The new portal also allows for single sign-on integration so that soon, with one login, users can use different services rather than having to log in multiple times across different platforms.”

On March 31 myHilltop went live for graduate students. The last registration slot was April 14 for freshmen. The recent launch of the program has gone smoothly for some students but also caused some controversy within the St. Edward’s community.

Registration was easy for junior Cailyn Trapani because she had all of her CRNs— the unique five digit codes for each class. She logged in right at 8 a.m.  and got all the classes she needed except for  one marketing class. 

“I wasn’t able to register for the class because even though it is a prerequisite, there is only one class offered. The system went down for about an hour, and there was mayhem across campus for anyone that didn’t sign in at 8 a.m.,” Trapani said.

For junior Alina Cahill, registration did not go as smoothly. She suffered many set backs before getting into her classes. She called IT for support; however, they were unable to provide the help Cahill needed and informed her the system was being overloaded.

Cahill arrived in the computer lab at 7:30 a.m. ready to register, but right at 8 a.m. the system went down. She continued to try and register until she had to leave for a 9 a.m. class.  “I tried again after and this time it went through, but I was too late in getting into a crucial class,” she said.

This year, for the first time, students were able to register during the day while administrative offices were completing business operations.

“In previous years, registration occurred during the evening hours because the EdWeb back-end could not support the load of registration on top of normal business operations. This was not ideal as help and support was often unavailable during these short evening windows,” Dunn said.

Cahill believes the idea of starting registration during class time is an irresponsible decision by the school because it encourages students to skip class to register.

“It makes me wonder if St. Ed’s is increasing class sizes to accommodate the increasing student population. I know a lot of other people didn’t get into classes they need,” she said. “I found myHilltop easy to navigate, but our servers crashing was frustrating.”

According to the OIT, myHilltop registered 154 students in the first 20 minutes of the junior registration window.

“This is what we expected to see, as during the same time frame on the graduate and senior registration windows, we registered 176 and 172 students respectively,” Dunn said.

OIT did admit that it experienced some technical difficulties in the first hour of junior registration, but said that it quickly identified and fixed the problem. Dunn said that overall the system supported the load and users were logged in and registering, without interruption, throughout the day.

“We continue to make adjustments to improve the experience for future registrations by fine-tuning our resource allotment and adjusting back-end configurations as advised by our consultants,” Dunn said.

Kinesiology professor and student advisor Kristy Ballard said that the transition period between EdWeb to myHilltop has been difficult, but she is hopeful that once the transition phase is over, myHilltop will benefit the university.

“It has been a bit frustrating going back and forth between two systems, but I think that once all of the kinks get worked out, this will be a nice system.  Until then, we all need to have patience,” she said.

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