Students Go Online to Get Grades
By Jay Antenen
Staff Writer

The My.Pomona Web Portal (my.pomona.edu), released Wednesday Pomona’s Registrar Office, is likely to change the way students access information from the course catalog and their academic transcripts. My.Pomona offers students the ability to view their GPAs, search the 5C course schedule and check their email all from one website.

Using the portal for the first time, Chelsea DeWitt ’06 exclaimed “wow” each time she found a new feature. “I think the site is really cool,” she said. “It will be really useful. I like the feature that allows me to email my professors directly from the site.”

In a memo, ITS Director Kenneth Pflueger said that students who received new passwords after the ITS password fiasco of October 2 should be able to login to My.Pomona without a problem using their email usernames and passwords, but students who did not get a new password will need to have ITS reset their password.

Faculty have had access to a website similar to My.Pomona since late October. Using the site, advisors can look up their advisees’ transcripts, course schedules, and pictures online. Professors can email an entire class with one click.

When My.Pomona is fully operational, students will be able to run detailed searches of the 5C course catalog, searching for classes based on the class meeting day, the professor, PAC requirement, location, and/or time. The site will also allow students to make GPA predictions, check the status of their financial aid, and eventually register for classes online. An online discussion board managed by ITS will be released in a few months.

“The Registrar’s Office is very excited to offer this service to students,” Registrar Margaret Adorno said. “We take a lot of pride in providing the website.”

Other liberal arts colleges have used web sites similar to My.Pomona for years; many using the same service as Pomona.

Bluffton College of Ohio’s web portal (jenzabar.bluffton.edu) looks identical to My.Pomona except for green instead of blue sidebars. The site has been running since 2000.

Adorno explained that Pomona faced special circumstances when it set out to create a web portal. Three years ago, Pomona and the rest of the Claremont Colleges switched to one unified administrative computing system. As a result any decision about a web portal had to be approved by all five colleges. Mutually deciding on a web portal took time.

Adorno said the entire process has been a labor of love. She asserts that if each college had “wanted to walk down this road by ourselves,” it would have been a quicker process. “But one of the important things about the 5C’s is that we work together,” she said.

Bluffton and Pomona’s sites are powered by software from Jenzabar Inc., an Internet services company specializing in software for higher education. Pomona uses Jenzabar’s “Internet Campus Solution” to provide web services to students.

Adorno said Pomona picked Jenzabar because it provided the most robust online features. “When we were evaluating different vendors’ systems, we wanted one that would provide the best services to students,” Adorno explained. “We wanted the best of the best.”

Other schools have had success with Jenzabar as well. In a Jenzabar press release Bluffton Professor of Music Dr. Lucia Unrau said, “I like the Jenzabar [web portal software] because it makes students think about things in new ways. One of the earlier concerns we’d had when we were considering using this sort of portal was that there wouldn’t be enough people-to-people talking, but we’ve found there’s actually more now, and in much greater depth.”

My.Pomona isn’t the last of the Pomona’s web initiatives. Portals for parents, staff, and alumni will be coming in the future.