Allow students to Waitlist in a section but register for another section of same course

We just used online registration for the first time and it was great...but we found one hiccup regarding waitlisting

If Course A has Section 1, 2, 3 and a student is waitlisted for Section 1, they should be allowed to register for Section 2 or 3. Right now, the other sections are grayed out as soon as they are added to a waitlist.

Students who are on a waitlist are not guaranteed that they'll be added to the course since it's possible no one will drop the course allowing new seats to be available. Also max enrollment may not be as easy to increase due to size of classroom. However, if the course is a required course, they need to be able to take it. If they are able to add another section of the course while testing their luck with the waitlist for another section, it will alleviate the registrar from tracking down who is on a waitlist and manually add them to another section. If a course only has 2 sections, it's not too bad but if there's more than 2 sections, the registrar will have to ask the students which other section of the course they want to be enrolled in....and this can be a nightmare.

I'm thinking there can be two approach to this problem:

1) Be able to turn of waitlist (as suggested in this post: https://support.populiweb.com/entries/20422771-Waiting-List-Option-to-Turn-Off)

2) Allow student to register for the other section while being on a waitlist.

With approach number 2, I think it can also accomplish what the person from the other post (reference above) wants. Additionally, with approach 2, if a student is waitlisted for Section 1 and is enrolled in Section 2, but later became enrolled in Section 1 as a result of moving up from the waitlist, s/he then has the option to drop Section 2.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Andrea Pacheco September 11, 2017 23:29

The ability for students to register for an open section and self waitlist for a closed section would be very helpful for our school as well!

We just did our registration online for the first time. What I noticed is that students selected their sections of preference and were waitlisted for the sections that were closed but were unable to then register themselves in an open section.

We require our students to follow a specific program plan of course work. By only waitlisting themselves for closed class(es), we had to reach out to a number of students (or they called us) to get them registered for another open section. To me this took away from the nature of online registration.

This also creates an issue for the Billing/Business Office as they may have to invoice/bill twice or multiple times depending on how quickly we get ahold of students and they add back the courses they need to take.

We would greatly appreciate you considering option 2 as requested above.

Thank you.

Allow students to Waitlist in a section but register for another section of same course

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