Technology of the Week Blog

It’s almost that time of year.  No, not the holidays just yet, but time to start registering for next semester’s classes!  So begins the appointment scheduling with your advisor and scouting out classes that you want to take for next semester.  Going to the Pace online class schedule or the printed schedule may or may not be the first place you look but pretty soon it should be!  The new Schedule Explorer website, currently in beta version, will soon make your life much easier.

This is not a replacement for the registration system! This simply helps you prepare for the registration by exploring the course offerings easily and collecting the courses that may be of interest to you. The registration process is still done through your MyPace Portal account.

Current Class Schedule Search Process

The present search tool for classes is the one provided by Banner, and is fairly basic.  After you select a semester, you are taken to a search page in which you can select many search criteria such as a Subject or Campus or a Professor.  When you click Class Search, you get a list of all the classes that meet your search criteria and clicking on a class provides you with further details such as the course description.  Modifying your search criteria requires you to start from the beginning by either clicking on the Return to Previous link or selecting New Search and starting all over.  A process many of us have experienced numerous times.   You can view the current class schedule search tool by clicking on the following link: http://www.pace.edu/page.cfm?doc_id=199.

New Class Schedule Search Process

The redesigned Schedule Explorer interface, provides a much easier and state of the art methodology to explore the rich set of courses offered at Pace. You are required to login with your MyPace Portal Username and Password. You may wonder why is it that you are being asked to login. It is because, as you explore the course schedule, we think that it would be cool for you to store away the classes that you are most interested in. This program provides a nice way to do that. You no longer have to write them down and remember to bring it with you when you meet with your advisor. After we check this out, we will have a version for anyone visiting our website to explore the courses that will not require a login.

You can select from the following dropdowns. The only difference is, you are not sent to a new screen every time you make a selection.

Required fields

• Term
• Subject/Area of Knowledge
• Campus

Optional fields

• Day of the Week

As you make your selections in the Required and Optional fields, a list of classes will automatically populate matching the search criteria.  The following information appears in a convenient, easy to read table:

• CRN
• Course
• Subject
• Credits
• Campus
• Days/Times
• Seats Remaining
• Instructor

You can click on the class CRN number and a pop-up box appears with detail information such as the term, type, level, instructor, campus, credits, prerequisites, course description, time, dates and location.  All in one convenient window! The window can then be closed and you can continue viewing your original search screen with all of your search results.

My Courses

As we mentioned before, you can store all the courses that interests you  When you are looking at the detailed description of a course, at the top right corner of the window you will see “click to add this course”. If you click on it, the course will be added to your My Courses collection. If you want to know what are all the courses that you have collected in your My Courses collection, click on the View My Courses link at the top. After you choose a semester, you will see the list and a little weekly calendar showing when the classes meet. We think the weekly calendar is a cool visual representation of class meeting times.

Who Can Benefit From The New System?

Everyone!  We think that this will be most helpful for advisors who are assisting students with their schedules.  The students can prepare the list of courses ahead of meeting the advisor, thereby making the process very efficient.

Again, it is important to keep in mind that this not a registration system!

Beta

Currently this new Scheduler Explorer website is in the testing phase, but you can preview it by clicking on the following link: https://appsrv.pace.edu/ScheduleExplorer.

Since the system is still in the design mode, we are looking to mold it to your preferences and make searching for classes as easy as possible.  We encourage you to take a look and test it out!  Your feedback is important to providing continuous improvement, so please use the link “CLICK HERE TO SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS” to send us your feedback.