By KATIE MEYER
ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR
For the numerous Fordham University students with smartphones, accessing school sites like My.Fordham.edu via their phones can be frustrating. The website is incompatible with a smartphone’s smaller screen, which makes text and images miniscule and difficult to see.
“The layout is not very user friendly because you have to zoom in to use it,” said Samantha Banellis, GSB ’16, on her difficulties with the Fordham portal.
This problem, however, might soon be solved. Fordham’s Office of Internet Services is currently in the final stages of production on a new My.Fordham portal design that is intended to make accessing important school-related information considerably easier.
The My.Fordham portal is an invaluable tool for students. It allows them to easily view course schedules, grades, enrollment status, accounts and more, as well as make tuition payments. It also links to resources like Blackboard and Fordham Gmail. Anywhere from 10,000 to over 13,000 students use the portal every day, and the new update will hopefully help to expand use even further.
“We recognize that everyone is on the go and doing more with their smartphones than they used to,” Charles Sanson, director of Internet Services at Fordham, said. “One of the IT mottos is access anytime, anywhere, anyhow and that brings us to the portal.”
The new portal design, tentatively entitled My.Mobile, will be designed to respond to the width of any screen, be it a computer, iPhone, iPad, Droid or BlackBerry. A faculty version has already been released for testing but has not yet been publicized. Like the faculty version, the student version of My.Fordham will be released as a beta, which means that the site will not yet be working at full capacity; some functions are not going to be introduced until later, and improvements will continue to be made for some time.
A small focus group of students will assist in improving the site in its early days. They will be providing feedback to Internet Services and suggesting new features for consideration as My.Mobile is further developed.
Sanson conceived My.Mobile about six months ago, and for the past three months he and a team of five Internet Services staff members have been working diligently to get the new portal in working order.
“If I can create something that will help 13,000 people per day, I feel pretty good about it,” Sanson said about the project.
Although the new layout has yet to be released, the IT department has high hopes for its effectiveness.
“I think it will make a real difference in the way students use the portal,” Deirdre Dillon, director of Customer Relations and Student Technology Services, said.
