It’s been three years since Enterprise Applications & Solutions Integration (EASI) completed a large upgrade to its Student Information Systems. Since then, students can now enrol in a fraction of the time that it used to take prior to the Platform Modernization Project.
Fast enrolment has a university-wide impact, relieving much of the stress that U of T’s 95,055 students face in preparation for their studies. In 2021, more than 10 times more students were able to enrol within the first minute of their enrolment window when compared to 2018.
See the extensive preparation that goes into planning for peak enrolment period, how testing has changed over time and the results of a finely tuned system.
Image Description: Peak Enrolment Period 2021 includes 15 major enrolment days across 3 campuses. Testing includes setting up 2,500 student accounts with the assistance of Information Security. Each account is validated to ensure login works and add/drop course transactions work. 3,500 logins are simulated over 45 seconds and add/drop course transactions are performed to test the limits of the system. In 2018, the Platform Modernization Project launched and updated infrastructure from a mainframe server to Linux servers. In 2019, the team performed extensive testing to tune the new Linux infrastructure. In 2020, EASI and Information Security worked to tune a new authentication process called UTORMFA. In 2021, the team performed standard testing using 2020 as a benchmark to confirm peak performance. As a result of these improvements, in 2018 one per cent of the day’s total course transactions occurred within the first minute while this number increased to 19 per cent for 2021. In 2018, three per cent of students enrolled in the first minute of their start time window while in 2021, this number increased to 43 per cent. Other improvements that the team has made include an update to the ACORN launchpad to Azure Cloud/WordPress and a renewed focus on security. These improvements are important because U of T has a large student population. 95,055 students are enrolled with 15,345 new full-time students entering First Entry undergraduate programs in fall 2020-21. U of T also welcomes international students from 164 countries and regions.
