System Administration for Faculty of Humanity Studies, Charles University in Prague

We began to use the Information System of Masaryk University shortly before we founded our Faculty of Humanity Studies, i.e. in 2000. We did so in order to be able to process our students' numerous records, each of which was unique due to the fact that each of our curricula - and there was a great number of these - differed from the others. At that time, we had about 800 students enrolled in Bachelor degree programmes and thus the electronic administration of their records (created in the environment governed by liberal curriculum rules) appeared highly desirable.

The Information System turned out to be reliable and powerful enough to meet our newly arising needs. Its administrators were upgrading it (partly at our requests) on a regular basis for it to satisfy our demands. The System proved its worth chiefly when the number of students rose to 2.000 and teachers began to use it for entering their grades, marking their entrance examination papers, and lots of other tasks. Its only weakness was a complex and extensive system of menus, with which, however, our students and teachers familiarized themselves quickly.

Unfortunately, in 2007 some practical reasons forced the Faculty to start using the information system utilized by the other faculties of Charles University. That is, all the student, teacher, dormitory, scholarship and other records had to be administered via this system and going on dividing the job between the two would be rather impractical. Therefore, with the kind assistance of our Brno colleagues in 2008, we moved all the records into the Charles University system (SIS UK) despite the fact the act represented a step backwards in a certain respect since its potential was still somewhat limited compared to that of IS MU.

As an IS MU user who was working with the System for eight years, I can recommend its deployment and use to everyone.