Liberty University’s Analytics and Decisions Support teams (ADS) uses a suite of technologies that allow expedient and interchangeable development of a front end graphical user interface to access Liberty University’s underlying Banner data. It allows for varying levels of customization, depending on the complexity of the business process that each specific form is intended to handle. The user interface and the workflow that supports it can both be customized to fit the needs of the business process.
By using Other Request in the ServiceNow catalog, ADS will consult with you to determine whether lightweight form development will best fit your needs. If lightweight form development is the best fit, they will work with you to develop a customizable form where you may easily obtain data from end-users and manipulate the data to fit your needs.
Why Lightweight Form Development?
Lightweight forms provide a standardized method for departments university-wide to obtain, maintain, and manipulate data to improve business processes and facilitate training Champions for Christ. Forms have an average development time between one week and two months depending on complexity and requirements.
Main Points
- Customizable
- Easy to Use
- Standardized Data Collection
- Increased Reportability
- Development Capable of Rapid Evolution
- Scalable
Examples of Forms
The Faculty Assignment Tool is used by academic departments to assign instructors to course sections. A few of the features available include:
- The ability to assign a single instructor to multiple sections at once
- The ability to copy assignments forward from previous subterms
- The ability to auto assign secondary instructors from the Faculty Hierarchy
Form Link: https://apex.liberty.edu/apex/banprd/f?p=106
The Transfer Suite is an application that allows students and staff to submit requests for a course accommodation outside the regular allowances. This form utilizes existing frameworks to expedite requests that previously took seven to ten days to complete thereby providing a better student experience and reportable data.
Form Link: https://www.liberty.edu/transfersuite
Satisfactory Academic Progress and Academic Standing Appeal Form are two processes that were often very confusing for students to differentiate in the past. Both depend on a student’s academic success, but each process is tied to a different department and to be suspended through one process does not necessarily mean you will be on suspension with the other process as well. This application requires only one submission and systematically determines who needs to see the appeal on the backend. This means less confusion for the student, and less needless work done for staff.
Form Link: https://apex.liberty.edu/apex/banprd/f?p=258
Before the creation of the application, Financial Aid staff were creating an excel document every day that kept track of the work the completed. At the end of the day they would save it on the molly. The next day they would start a new excel document and do the same thing. The application improved this process in a number of ways. First off, we are no longer using a wealth of molly space to save daily excel documents of approximately 100 employees. Secondly, the data is now reportable. Trends can be seen, and students can be looked up to see what staff performed what tasks on particular students. Coordinators can track the progress of employees as they grow in experience. Since the inception of the application, it has been adopted by several teams in the Student Accounts and Military Affairs departments.
Form Link: https://apex.liberty.edu/apex/banprd/f?p=322
The Transcript Request form is used by Enrollment Verification to process requests from applicants/students that would like Liberty University to request the their Official Transcript from previously attended colleges. Applicants/students can start this process electronically, through mail or clearinghouse. The TRF apex form logs the status of these requests and houses numerous automations such as email triggers, jobs to update and import new requests and processes to track which institutions Enrollment is able / unable to request Transcripts from.
Form Link: https://apex.liberty.edu/apex/banprd/f?p=445