Don’t get me wrong, I sympathize with you. I am just a little
skeptical about where the blame is being placed.

>And as for it having only been live for three weeks, the code
was written five years ago.

This is a tad naive. The peoplesoft campus solutions code has
been about for a while, but customization of such software to be
deployed into a very complex system takes a bit of tweaking. The
sheer number of actors in this system make testing a far from
trivial task (the glasgow way of completely open choice in 1st
and 2nd year must be a combinatorial nightmare).

As to your immediate problem,

>For my course and my year, we’re nearly into the fourth week of
term and we have rent to pay and we’re skint. So, yeah, that’s a
bit of a motivation for genuine complaint, if I’m honest.

I strongly recommend you get in touch with the SRC

http://www.src.gla.ac.uk/advice/

Of course they’re fine dealing with the SRC, as it seems they have their own pet in place as President.

OK, then.

First, I am not a member of staff kicking up bluster. I am a final year student, I have a number of genuine complaints, and I have at this point made my genuine complaints to several people. I am in my fifth year and in the four years previous, I never had any problems with Websurf.

My initial complaint was that the order in which MyCampus became active didn’t seem to take into account the fact that different people started term at different times, which meant that the rollout was completely random, which meant that medics in their clinical years weren’t able to do anything about registration until five days before their academic year started. If only I had known what was to come, I’d have thought that we were getting off lightly.

The financial registration does not recognise my funding body as a valid funding body, which means that I have to upload a scanned document proving that they are funding me. My funding body, incidentally, is NHS England, which is not exactly what you’d call unheard of. The way in which funding for medical students works means that there are a lot of us who are funded by NHS England and we’ve all had this problem. There are other people whose funding bodies are not recognised as valid funding bodies, either. Those people are funded by such obscure organisations as the Northern Ireland Education and Library Boards (the equivalent of SAAS) and Her Majesty’s Armed Forces. You cannot take this document in in person or post it or allow your funding body to send it in for you, all three of which were valid options under the old system. Oh, and the system still does not allow you to enrol even once you’ve uploaded everything, so the whole process is pointless in the extreme. And because the system will not allow you to enrol even once you have completed all the necessary bits and bobs, you are not registered, and without being registered, most funding bodies will not release student loans and you can’t apply for hardship funds. For my course and my year, we’re nearly into the fourth week of term and we have rent to pay and we’re skint. So, yeah, that’s a bit of a motivation for genuine complaint, if I’m honest.

Then there’s the fact that I myself have not yet received written confirmation from NHS England that they will fund me this year. They will, but I haven’t got a letter from them yet, so I can’t upload it. Last year, I would have had until October to provide my written confirmation of fees funding. I assumed that I would still have until October. Instead, I got a phone call on Monday from someone who said that they were calling from the university and wished to inform me that if I didn’t complete financial registration by Sunday evening then I would be refused entry to this academic year and would have to drop back a year. I lost it a bit at that point. Because, not being able to graduate this year because MyCampus doesn’t work? Well, that’s a bit of a motivation for genuine complaint, too. That was when I hung up on the person on the phone and became the short shouty woman in the middle of the Fraser Building. I was not the only person to receive such a phone call and so far as I can gather, most of the English-domiciled final year medical students, many of whom, like me, do not have written confirmation of our funding yet, are still final year medical students only because the medical school has managed to buy us some time.

And as for it having only been live for three weeks, the code was written five years ago. Yes, when something goes live there are always teething problems that were never anticipated in beta, but you’d think that at some point in the last five years there might have been the opportunity to test it enough that there weren’t problems on a scale that I would categorise more as DOA than as simple teething troubles.

It seems to me that a lot of the bluster that gets kicked up comes directly from staff. I’m sure there are a host of genuine complaints out there, but I’d appreciate if people were more open about their motivations (I’m just a general cynic FYI). There has been a barrage of FOI requests from the very start [1] and clear hostility towards the project. It make me wonder if placing the blame on SLP or SMG or whatever TLA (three-letter-acronym) of choice is quite so clear cut. A number of errors that I’ve heard about seem to be departmental (or school, that is annoying I grant you) in nature, things like incorrect course credits and course (pre)requisites. Hmm…

>(By way of comparison, Microsoft Word enjoys its twenty-eighth birthday this year. Imagine a business model premised on using that first edition of Word from 1983 until now.)

Bad comparison, plenty of software from the 80′s is still around today, mostly backend stuff.

>I suppose that a nine-hundred strong Facebook group full of complaints will indeed attract interest, but I don’t think we’re getting the sort of reputation that SMG had in mind.

[2] [3] [4]

Really, do people not remember websurf? If you have been successful in blocking it, let me know how. My copious-volume-of-gin-for-breakfast method has so far been unsuccessful.

The system has been active for 3 weeks or something. Let’s wait a while before we judge.

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[2]

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