By Patrick Tindall

Riverside City College is debuting an update to its outdated class registration system.

Touted as “an algorithmic-based student academic planning software for colleges and universities” is the long-awaited update for RCC’s WebAdvisor platform which was clunky, non-user-friendly and difficult to understand which classes were useful to a student’s academic goals.

Business, psychology and communications majors were chosen to participate last fall in the beginning stages of the EduNav preliminary rollout and have been using the new system to register for classes.

The system works much like Google Maps, and acts as a navigation system towards your educational end goal with real-time updates which “re-route” you towards success depending on which classes are required for your degree, which ones are open or which ones are filled up.

EduNav puts students on a tailored map towards their personal education goals as well as monitors student progress which ultimately can increase college completion rates.

The program works extremely intuitively and selects which classes are best suited towards a student’s specific goals. Students can see their major on the home screen as well as a detailed map of the required courses needed to complete their area of study, broken down by semester which allows students to view the time it will take to complete their degree.

In addition, instead of having to go to a counselor to set a plan, students can now do it for themselves giving freedom from having to find appointments and waiting in lines to see counselors.

Any new system is, of course, not without a few hiccups.

“Most issues have to do with registration,” Akia Marshall, an EduNav specialist in the welcome center said, “classes are being registered but upon starting back up into the EduNav window, the selections aren’t registered anymore.”

“EduNav has been known to be a bit finicky when it comes to selecting classes,” Caroline Tago an Admissions employee said. “Student selections sometimes don’t stick and get booted out.”

Students, of course, had their own reactions to the new changes.

“I liked how everything was laid out for you instead of guessing like what WebAdvisor did.” Angel Peña, a student journalist who had been using EduNav since last semester,  said. “One thing I didn’t like was only a few students had access so we were unsure how to use it.”

“I liked the formatting of it, it shows you each semester simplified,” Yesenia Huby, another student EduNav user, said. “What I didn’t like is if you are used to WebAdvisor it just threw you in there without any warning. I like the concept but it’s extremely slow.”

Other known technical issues include selections not being saved, classes being viewable but unavailable for registration or the website not loading at all.

“We’re still working on some bugs,” Marshall said, “but if anyone has any issues with it, we’re here to help in the Welcome Center. We have employees who are specially trained to help with any problem.”

There is no definite rollout date for EduNav set as of yet due to troubleshooting, but students will be notified once the new system is set to go live.