Nate Dissi registered for his Fall 2007 courses at 1 a.m. Monday using the new Banner registration system for the first time.

He registered early to make sure he got into the courses he needs during his senior year.

“It was much more convenient,” than the old system, said Dissi.

He was one of about 1,000 students that registered by 3:30 p.m. Monday, the first day of registration for seniors and priority registration students.

Bill Witsman, director of Banner, the ongoing information system upgrade at Eastern, said the new registration system worked without any major problems Monday.

“I think we’ve done a very good job,” Witsman said. Eastern has been preparing and tailoring the new software for months to fit Eastern’s needs.

Now with the first major day of registration, the only problems have been small glitches and individual issues, Witsman said.

“The problems aren’t far reaching,” Witsman said. We’ve obviously been able to register a lot of students and should be able to do more throughout the week.”

Problems involving correct PIN numbers, data conversion from the old to the new system and glitches within Banner could all be the cause of some of these problems, Witsman said.

Kathy Reed, associate director of Information Technology Services, said the HELP desk received some calls Monday with questions about alternate PIN numbers and wait listing courses.

One of the largest problems involved senior transfer students and converting their academic information into Banner. The system was not allowing some of these students to register because it did not recognize them as seniors.

“It has to do with the way that they’re coded in Banner as far as their status as a senior,” Witsman said. “As (these cases) have come up, we’ve been able to get them resolved.”

As registration continues, Witsman expects to get most of the kinks worked out of the system as they arise.

“I guess for the freshman they’re in the best situation because we’ll have some of these issues resolved by the time they register,” he said.

The freshmen class can begin to register April 23.

Besides the smaller problems that surfaced Monday, there are some other larger issues that probably won’t be worked out until registration for the spring semester.

One issue is the process of registering priority registration students. In order to register Monday, all priority students had to be registered by a staff in the department that qualifies them as priority registration students.

“We weren’t real thrilled about the way we had to do (priority registration),” Witsman said. “We hope to get that straightened out by the next time we register.”

Another issue concerns course prerequisites. Banner is not recognizing prerequisites for course registration this semester because not all of the student academic history has been loaded into the Banner system yet.

This means that departments have to manually check prerequisites.

In order to take care of this issue, the school of business is asking students with a business minor to fill out a course request form to ensure they are eligible for the classes they register for.

Kathy Schmitz, director of the student center for academic and professional development in the school of business, was helping students through the process Monday.

“If they’re a minor then they have to come to us,” Schmitz said.

With the old system, there was a code that would allow minors to register for courses even though they were not in the school of business. The new system isn’t allowing such a code to be used.

“We have lots of classes that have prerequisites on them,” Schmitz said. “It’s going to be very time and labor intensive.”

If students are registered for courses they are not eligible for they will receive an e-mail asking them to drop the course. If they do not, the school of business will have to remove them, Schmitz said.

Robyn Barron, a senior marketing major, said she registered Monday but prefers the old system to the new one.

“It did work but I thought that the other way was more convenient,” Barron said.