When it comes to unique and innovative software creation, two heads are better than one.
For two University staff members, 30 years of institutional knowledge and three years of software engineering experience combined to make “GradWeb,” the first software program designed specifically for graduate school business.
GradWeb, which has been in use at the University for more than two years, has transformed student records management at the Graduate School, saving thousands of dollars in administrative costs.
“GradWeb has positively changed the way the Graduate School does business,” Toby Deemer, assistant dean of the Graduate School and co-creator of the program, said in an e-mail interview.
Before GradWeb, all Graduate School business practices required a paper trail on interactions among students, department staff, faculty, Graduate School staff and the Office of the Registrar. The University had 23 forms to track and record the progress of each graduate student from admission through to the application for his or her degree. Every form had to be copied, filed with the Graduate School and sent both to departments and to students.
“The Graduate School printed 45,000 pieces of paper each year and none of our processes were online,” Deemer said.
Today, only two forms remain while everything else is done electronically. Through GradWeb’s six interactive modules, or features, the program has cut the need to print, mail and process more than 30,000 forms annually, while just one of the modules has saved 300 administrative hours each year.
“The University of Oregon takes great pride in the effective use of technology to do business, and it seemed to us in the Graduate School that the time had come to change the way we did business,” Deemer said.
During the summer of 2000, Deemer came up with the idea for GradWeb when she decided to plan her retirement and realized her institutional knowledge would be leaving with her.
“I began to design a plan to present to the dean of the Graduate School that would construct a method to transfer my knowledge and experience into a clear and transparent format,” she said. “Web technology was, at that point in time, providing excellent service for the exchange of information.”
She recruited former graduate student and software designer Asif Suria, and together they created GradWeb.
“We searched the Web sites of other graduate schools and did not find a fully integrated system that supported the business practices of graduate education,” Deemer said. “It was at this point we decided to construct our own.”
Since the creation of GradWeb, Deemer and Suria have entered into a licensing agreement with the University and formed Eugene Software Solutions to help market it.
Suria, who is president of Eugene Software Solutions, once worked at the Graduate School as a graduate teaching fellow. He said when he called Deemer in early 2001 in search of an opportunity to return to campus, he liked her idea and decided to move back to Eugene from San Francisco.
“Working with Toby on GradWeb has been a very enriching experience,” Suria said in an e-mail interview. “She has a vast amount of knowledge of graduate school practices and an excellent way of working with people.”
Currently, GradWeb allows interaction between students, the Graduate School and departments to be handled electronically with automatic e-mail notifications sent to all parties. By creating a record of interactions, such as applications for admission and advanced degrees, GradWeb creates virtually error-proof permanent student records, Deemer said.
Political Science graduate coordinator Ilene Proudfoot said she finds GradWeb quick, easy and efficient.
“Because there is less paperwork, there’s less of a chance of documents getting lost,” she said. “I can also keep a nice track of students’ records.”
During the 2003 calendar year, 312,794 pages were accessed on GradWeb, which includes individual usage directly related to Graduate School business, Deemer said. Last year, GradWeb processed 1377 applications for graduate degrees, showing a 30 percent increase from the year before.
Since last December, the first month of the admission application cycle, Deemer said she’s already seen a 15 percent increase in online processing compared to December 2002. She added that a number of other universities are extremely impressed by the GradWeb modules and “have shown a real interest in having something similar for themselves.”
Since GradWeb’s completion, Deemer said the biggest challenge has been “keeping our excitement from spilling over and trying to do too much all at once.”
From a technical point of view, Suria also said two big challenges were migrating more than 10 years of data across different databases and platforms and ensuring accessibility across all browsers and platforms.
“For the project as a whole, the biggest challenge that any new software system faces is adoption by users and making sure that the software is easy to use,” Suria said.
Deemer said she is very proud to have been a part of the software creation because of the opportunity to serve the University.
“I have been blessed with a long career at this institution and have always worked with people that have been supportive and creative,” she said.