Students coming back to campus this semester will have to adjust to something digital along with the typical construction.
MyBelmont, the university’s new community intranet system, was fully implemented in December as the most recent overhaul to the Belmont Intranet Connection.
Getting the new system to this point took more than a year from its initial start, said April Hefner, the school’s assistant director of communications and the chair of the steering committee for the system.
Many, if not all, of BIC’s features like BannerWeb, Blackboard and Classfinder are all still accessible under the new system. Features that used to take multiple steps in the old system, such as registration, BannerWeb and employee timecards, are now available with a single click in the new one.
“That was an important goal for the committee,” said Becky Spurlock, the associate dean of students who was also on the steering committee. “We wanted the portal to be seemless and intuitive.”
The design, she said, has already brought good reviews from the nearly 5,000 people who had signed up for MyBelmont by last week.
“We’ve received several unsolicited positive responses from users who have used the portal,” Spurlock said.
After working with BIC, a years-old system that had been consistently added onto, implementing an updated program meant showing students all the old and new systems could do for them, Hefner said. Now, links and features that provide the site’s content are almost all accessible through panels at the left and top of the screen.
Many of the features will also be accessible off of a computer through what Spurlock called a “more functional and desirable” mobile site.
Through the final transition to MyBelmont, and even into its eventual updates, Hefner expects the portal will always be a work in progress capable of changing to meet students’ needs.
“Our hope is that it will continue to grow and we’ll be able to add more and more things as time goes on,” she said.