Online system to be implemented by spring 2015

With the introduction of online program OrgSync, significant changes are in the works for how student life at the University of Toledo is organized.

Blackboard for student life

OrgSync is a Web-based system designed for organizing and keeping track of student life on college campuses. The OrgSync website said it creates an online community that can be tailored for each user.

OrgSync’s website also said their product “helps [the client] connect and engage with the populations you serve, improves information sharing, minimizes paper usage, tracks co-curricular involvement, and allows [the client] to generate reports on all data collected for annual reports and accreditation.”

Clayton Notestine, Student Government president, said OrgSync is going to be the new online alternative to the “old paper-and-pen version of organizing student life.”

“OrgSync is essentially the BlackBoard, but for student life,” he said. “It takes a lot of the process for interacting and doing paperwork or your day-to-day operations and makes it electronic, puts it online.”

Front end and back end

Notestine said OrgSync is a program that both students and staff of the university will be able to utilize.

“OrgSync is both a front end and a back end; the front end is what the students interact with, it’s everything from having a website for your organization to having online rosters,” Notestine said.“If you’re a student organization president, it’s what allows you to keep track of your membership. On the back end, it’s everything that the University of Toledo staff has to do, whether that be reserving a room, or renewing documents or updating liability forms.”

Tamika Mitchell, dean of students and SG’s adviser, said OrgSync brings several organizational benefits to both groups, with features that are meant to assist both the students in the organizations and the staff who are overseeing and keeping track of them, while fostering communication between the two.

“It also allows students to be able to promote and advertise events to one another, communicate with one another, have websites,” Mitchell said. “It’s a software that contains a lot of features to really benefit how an organization organizes amongst itself, but also how the university and the staff in student life and the Student Union can support the programs, the advertising, the organization, the leadership, development and that process of running an organization.”

Change is needed

The current system handling student life is dated, according to Notestine.

“The biggest problem is infrastructure, how our process works,” Notestine said. “We have a lot less staff than we did ten years ago, and we have more student organizations, a lot more diverse things happening on campus then we did a long time ago.”

Eric DiBell, SG chair of student affairs, said that students are discouraged from starting clubs or putting on events by the system in place, something that he feels OrgSync will change.

“Students who are new to the university, that are trying to set up clubs or have never put on an event before, are finding themselves put off of the idea by all the paperwork and the red tape,” DiBell said.

Mitchell said OrgSync would simplify some of the procedures that currently surround student life, moving them from paper versions to electronic ones.

According to Notestine, the program is well worth the cost to the university.

“It’s about $50,000 a year, which comparatively to anything else that we’ve spent to try and improve UT student life, is not even remotely a huge cost to us,” he said.

Revolutionizing the system

Mitchell said OrgSync will have the biggest effect on the level of control students will have over their organizations.

SG has a cohesive plan to implement the use of OrgSync. The first step is a large unveiling that will be done in the Trimble Lounge with members of the bigger student organizations, and then SG will reach out to the smaller groups.

“What we want to do is have a large meeting in the Trimble Lounge, invite a lot of the larger organizations, ones that we think that a lot of students are involved in,” DiBell said. “We basically want to give them this huge PowerPoint — why OrgSync, what is OrgSync going to do, what benefits we will get from OrgSync and why we feel it’s a better system than what we had.”

Going forward

Notestine said Kaye Patten Wallace, in agreement with the IT department, ultimately made the decision to buy OrgSync for the university, and started to write a contract in early October which is currently being finalized.

Mitchell said student organizations will be officially transitioning to implement the OrgSync system by spring of 2015.