Brown and White Vol. 135 no. 19

              The Brown and White Vol. 135 No. 19
Tuesday, November 13, 2018 ‘All the Lehigh News First’
Students adjust to new course registration tools
Courtesy of Kiran Aida
Student class registration takes place online via the Lehigh Student Portal under the
Banner section. Coursicle is one of many online planning tools that allows students to
create multiple schedule combinations for the following semester.
By JULIA MORAN
B&W Staff
Registration for winter and
spring courses started Nov. 12.
Some registration changes made it
difficult for students to plan their
schedules.
Allen Taylor, the director of
Technology and Campus Services,
said Lehigh’s new registration sys-tem,
through Banner, was created
by a company named Ellucian.
“(Ellucian) regularly issues
updates related to the different
modules that we have,” Taylor said.
“Earlier this year, they released an
update for the registration module.
We made that available to students
in the spring of 2018 for fall regis-tration.”
Before this update, students used
other planning tools not direct-ly
affiliated with the university,
such as the scheduling website EZ
Semester. However, the switch to
Banner led to issues with this site.
Last month, Tori Campbell, ’20,
was upset to find that EZ Semester
might be shut down due to the
developer’s inability to access data
needed to update the site. She
brought her concerns to the Lehigh
Class of 2020 Facebook group page
on Oct. 26. See TOOLS Page 3
Courtesy of Gabriela Hrubcova
Kevin Cassidy, left, the director of the ILO Office for the United States, poses with a group during the Lehigh Global Village
program in New York, during the summer of 2015. Cassidy was part of the decision to choose Lehigh as a site for the ILO’s
centary celebration.
By MUSA JAMSHED
Managing Editor
When the International Labor
Organization turns 100 years old on
April 11, 2019, it will celebrate by
holding conferences worldwide.
The U.N. agency strategically
scoped the globe for locations and
institutions best suited to participate
in the festivities.
Ultimately, the ILO selected
Bethlehem as the single participating
host to represent the United States,
with the conference to be held at
Lehigh on April 11.
This conference will be one of many
held around the world to honor the
ILO centenary.
Bill Hunter, the director of fellow-ship
advising and U.N. Programs,
said the conference, called ‘The
Future of Work,’ will explore issues
of change in the workforce, including
globalization and the introduction of
artificial intelligence.
In its event concept note that pro-posed
the plan to the ILO, the univer-sity
outlined a semester-long series
of thematic events to lead up to the
April 11 conference.
All events will be open to Lehigh
faculty, staff and students.
The keynote speakers, who Hunter
said will be announced in early 2019,
will likely consist of U.N. and NGO
officials, and possibly heads of the
ILO from Geneva.
Lehigh prevailed in securing its
role in the ILO’s historical mile-stone
largely because of its close
work with the U.N. as a recognized
Nongovernmental organization, and
its relationship with Kevin Cassidy,
the director of the ILO Office for the
United States.
Cassidy has visited Lehigh sever-al
times and has given briefings to
Lehigh students on issues such as
global labor. Cassidy said his fre-quent
and positive interactions with
Lehigh students made the university
an attractive option for this confer-ence.
“I found that the questions they
were positing were very interesting
and brought in a global perspective,”
Cassidy said. “We need to work in a
diverse, multicultural environment,
and I felt that Lehigh brought that to
the table.”
Last year, a group of Lehigh stu-dents
held a conference at the U.N.
headquarters in New York City for
the first time. Similarly, another
group of students will hold a confer-ence
one week after the April 11 con-ference
to share findings and open an
international discussion about future
work.
This initiative’s semester-long
See UN Page 2
“Does anyone else use EZ
Semester and find the Lehigh reg-istration
process on Banner con-fusing?,”
Campbell wrote in the
group. “Maybe if we all email the
registration office they will provide
the necessary data to this student
so that he can continue running a
process that makes sense and is
easy to use.”
Campbell had used EZ Semester
since the first semester of her first
year and said it was simple and
easy for students to use.
“You would just type in the sub-ject
and all of the classes would pop
up, and you could plan your sched-ule
online,” Campbell said. “Pretty
much everybody used it.”
Jonathan Wu, ’17, the developer
of EZ Semester, said the issues
Lehigh students had with his
site were tied to the switch to
Banner, but it was not intentional
on Lehigh’s end. Prior to Lehigh’s
contract with Ellucian, one of the
university’s departments hosted
the system internally.
The way Ellucian hosted its
data made it difficult for Wu to
retrieve the information he needed
to update the site.
With the help of Cody Benkoski,
From industrial to international
Lehigh selected to host labor conference in the Steel City