Bradley recently made a change to its student application service named Webster, which was officially decommissioned and combined with a new service titled MyBradley.
Webster was originally used to keep track of students’ personal information, class schedule, course audits and course registration. While Webster did its job for many years, the university deemed that it was time for a change due to the new academic calendar. The switch created first and second half sessions of the fall and spring semesters and was approved in the fall of 2022.
“Webster was written in an outdated programming language and was going to be very difficult to update to include registration for these new sessions,” academic records specialist Rachel Elizarraraz said. “The university felt this was a prime opportunity to design a new student registration system that would not only meet our immediate needs as we institute the new calendar, but also have more opportunities for enhancements going forward.”
While the switch, which officially took place on March 27, helped meet the immediate needs of registration, the timing did not soothe the stress of students as they tried to create their schedule for the upcoming semester.
“I wasn’t sure how to register on MyBradley when I was used to registering on Webster,” sophomore biochemistry major Chelsea Smith said. “So on top of wondering how I was going to get into my classes, I was also trying to figure out how the site worked.”
Aside from the surprise of the sudden change, there are many perks of MyBradley, including the registration cart.
The registration cart differs vastly from the way that Webster allowed students to register for classes. On Webster, students would have to individually type in the course number and section before hitting submit. Conversely, MyBradley allows students to type in all the courses that they are taking ahead of time and place it into their cart.
“Once students build their carts, it is saved in their account,” Elizarraraz said. “The student can log in once their registration time comes and a ‘Register From Cart’ button will appear. Clicking this button will simultaneously attempt to enroll students in all of the courses in their cart.”
This new feature has received praise from some students in the Honors Program who registered for classes on April 6.
“I would say the cart is helpful because it tells you if you don’t have the prerequisites for your courses or if you don’t have time for the class in the schedule,” Smith said.
Some students that have to wait until next week to register for classes are worried about the site crashing because of the abundance of students registering at the same time. There are safety measures put in place to make sure that no student will get cheated out of classes.
“In the event that it [MyBradley] does momentarily go down, there is a fail-safe which will pause registration for everyone in that time slot and in the subsequent time slots until the issue is resolved,” Elizarraraz said. “This ensures that no one can jump ahead of anyone else to register.”
Currently, there are still improvements and changes being made to MyBradley but the university has big hopes for the site.
“Our goal is for MyBradley to become the ‘one-stop-shop’ for everything related to your student record at Bradley,” Elizarraraz said.
