EASy Does It: Adding and Dropping Courses the EASy Way

UC San Diego launched a web application, Enrollment Authorization System (EASy) for students, staff and faculty to streamline the process of requesting and granting authorization to enroll in classes.  The system facilitates the enrollment authorization workflow communication between students, instructors, undergraduate colleges and department advisors, Graduate Division, medical and professional schools, the International Center, and Summer Session.  EASy’s functions include: exceptions to course prerequisites, enrollment exceptions, late adds, drops, changes to grading options and number of units earned, bypassing restrictions, instructor approvals, batch additions of authorizations to the campus mainframe, data analysis for staff, and more. 

The requests are routed through an appropriate workflow, and some features are customizable per department policies.  Approvals are automatically updated in the mainframe to allow for real time action.  This saves time and increases efficiency for staff, faculty, and students.  Users can track request status and are notified via emails once a decision has been made on the request

As a student-facing system, EASy has a mobile-friendly interface, to make it as convenient as possible for students to submit and check on their requests from their smartphones.

EASy was the first campus system to use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to not only access real-time information from the campus mainframe, but to also update it.  This was a huge step for web application efforts, which have traditionally relied upon the campus data warehouse for information, which is refreshed nightly, and can’t be updated by web applications. Through the collaborative efforts of central campus developers at Information Technology Services, the APIs allowed EASy to become a robust system, capable of making real-time updates to the campus mainframe.