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Providence College Sees ‘Night and Day’ Improvement Using LYNX Interface

Data Uploads Between Banner and 25LiveNow Take Minutes Instead of Hours

Providence College

Providence, Rhode Island

Products

25Live® Class and Event Scheduling System with LYNX

Why 25Live and LYNX?

“Before we used 25Live, we had a big magnetic board with magnets and a grid, and that’s how we did all of our class scheduling. Moving to software was a huge improvement to say the least, and now with LYNX, scheduling has never been more simple.” – Gina DeBernardo, Associate Registrar

The Savings

Time: “My time is now completely my own, and it’s a huge weight off my shoulders. I can’t say it enough: it’s like night and day. For any data transfer task, it’s a matter of minutes now instead of hours.” – DeBernardo

Providence College Logo

The Challenge

For years, Providence College has been using the 25Live system to manage class and event scheduling. While 25Live is a marked improvement over the school’s previous manual system, administration still found themselves dedicating a considerable amount of time and energy to importing courses from their Banner SIS. With the school’s previous interface, course uploads from Banner often took hours to complete, and errors were difficult to sort out.

“If something changed on our end for Banner or if we upgraded the interface version, we had to make sure everything still worked,” says Gina DeBernardo, Associate Registrar. “The interface was hard to get your head around, so finding the source of problems could be tricky. We’d have to make hours-long phone calls to find the issues, and it could take us easily a week to get everything working correctly again.”

With so many other demands on their time and attention, school administrators began searching for ways to expedite their scheduling tasks.

The Solution

When DeBernardo saw the announcement that CollegeNET had created the LYNX interface for Banner, she was quick to schedule a webinar for herself and members of the school’s IT department. The team was thrilled by the interface’s speed and simplicity, and they immediately signed up to try it within their own 25Live setup.

“We had a winter session coming up that had very few courses, so I used that to play around with LYNX,” says DeBernardo. “I loaded everything up in test, and it was just so simple. I mean, really, really simple. You know when something is so easy, you think you must be doing it wrong? That’s exactly how I felt.”

After confirming with IT that everything had worked as expected, DeBernardo was able to move LYNX straight into production, importing the spring semester’s much larger set of courses.

“I’m used to sitting and importing all the 1000-1500 spring courses over about three hours,” says DeBernardo. “With LYNX, I was done in less than five minutes. I was completely floored. You just select a semester, push it through, and poof—it’s done! It’s truly night and day.”

DeBernardo also discovered how quickly and easily LYNX error reporting identifies any course that fails to upload properly. Just like LYNX data importing, this previously challenging task now takes mere minutes to complete.

The Benefits

  • Time and resource savings: Upload times have been reduced from hours to minutes, and the simple LYNX interface makes navigation and testing effortless, freeing up countless hours for administration and IT.
  • Easy integration: CollegeNET support works with school administration to configure each LYNX setup for each school’s specific needs. “This is also why I wanted to go with LYNX,” says DeBernardo. “I wanted a way out from having to know everything. I wanted someone else to set it up, and say, ‘Okay, here go you, Gina. Use your product.’”
  • Improved error reporting: LYNX alerts users to any specific course that didn’t upload correctly, allowing administration to quickly and easily address upload issues.”

What's Next?

DeBernardo plans to improve scheduling efficiency even further by implementing the Schedule25® optimizer at some point in the future. The optimizer uses a dynamic scheduling algorithm to automatically assign classes to rooms, based on room features and specific class requirements. This promises to cut scheduling times by an order of magnitude, allowing administrators to take back even more of their valuable time.

About Providence College

Providence College Campus
© Photo provided by Providence College
Providence College was founded in 1917 in Providence, Rhode Island. Through community efforts and donations, its founders were soon able to break ground on the school’s first building. Two years later, in September 1919, the doors of Harkins Hall opened to its first 71 students and nine faculty members. From a single building on 17 acres of land, the school has grown into a comprehensive campus covering 105 acres.
For 14 consecutive years, U.S. News and World Report has ranked Providence College one of the top regional colleges and universities in the North. The school took first place in this category in 2017. The Providence College School of Business has been ranked number 61 in the Bloomberg Businessweek list of top 100 undergraduate business programs in the country.
Today, Providence College offers 50 major fields of study. It is home to 4,680 students and boasts an 85 percent graduation rate.

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