Improvements made to the Contra Costa Community College District’s WebAdvisor portal has streamlined the enrollment process for students while Desire to Learn (D2L) has done the same for daily coursework and emails.

Director of Admissions and Records Catherine Frost said the CCC campus and administrators have taken proactive measures to clean up the system, making it run smoother.

Frost said the most useful software upgrade is the function that allows students to forward important information from their InSite portal to their personal email.

She said the periodical updates help students early in the semester so that they can focus more on academics the first couple of weeks and less on the enrollment process.

“This is actually one of the smoothest starts in recent memory with the school’s website and WebAdvisor,” Technology Systems Manager James Eyestone said, “The system hasn’t crashed this semester and I’ve noticed shorter lines in Admissions and Records.”

Frost said the installation of the Welcome/Transfer Center in the Student Services Center has also helped reduce the lines and frustrations that come with a historically drawn out enrollment process.

Kelly Lopez, nursing major, said the district did a good job making WebAdvisor “easier” for her to navigate as she signed up for classes this semester. 

“The web can be easily manipulated to any student’s criteria,” Eyestone said. “Technology is always changing just like passwords, and that’s what we’re working on next to improve here on campus.”

Jagdeep Toor and Ikjot Singh are both science majors and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) students at CCC.

Toor said he used the new InSite email feature, which allows students to forward important dates, homework, or class lectures to their personal email, which was the most useful feature that was improved.

“Everything in InSite mail is super standard and gives students a general broad view of important updates such as drop dates and more,” he said. “Just set up the InSite email to your own personal email and everything will be forwarded automatically,” Toor Said.

Lopez said she also made use of the email feature that allows you to forward messages to your personal email. “It just made everything easier to connect both school updates and my personal stuff into one email account.”

Singh, however, offered a different solution and said individuals who want a more impactful academic experience can set up email notifications through D2L.

Frost said, “Students have to realize (D2L) and WebAdvisor are two completely different components.”

D2L is more of a contained system between the instructor and the student, she said. WebAdvisor plays a similar role in communicating with students in that regard, while WebAdvisor offers a more in-depth and broader aspect of communicating with student class schedule updates and campus events and workshops. 

“Wow, I didn’t know that,” Toor said. “You can learn something new every day.” Singh, in his second semester, said there are specialized functions on D2L that you can turn, “on or off,” if students really want to focus on school.

Eyestone said students used to complain about the difficulties of setting up an email using WebAdvisor when first implemented.

He said it is the IT department’s job to support all computers on campus and their software for students majoring in any field.

“Technology can be a generational type of thing and we’ve evolved,” Eyestone said.