Class Key Word Search Enhancements Now Available

Web users intuitively know that a keyword search is a type of search that looks for matching web pages or documents that contain one or more words specified by the user.

With input from Madison College students and staff a project has just been completed that offers significant enhancements to the class key word search capability within the College’s PeopleSoft system.

The project team included representatives from Madison College, Southwest Technical College and Western Technical College. This team designed and implemented significant technical and business process changes and features that include:

• Extensive course catalog revisions to ensure clear and consistent class offering information
• Expansion of the number of fields that are used by the search engine from one to four which dramatically increases the likelihood that the search will return requested information.
• Enhanced search options so students can select between degree/credit courses, non-degree/non-credit courses – or include both types of courses in their search.
• The ability to filter courses by the number of credits/units
• The ability to filter by specified class start date

The quality plans for this project included student and staff usability testing. These usability tests confirmed the benefit of the new search solution and also identified valuable future class search improvement opportunities.

Project Team Members include: Sharon Kelley, Peri Mills, Fran Moritz, Lori Sebranek, Jayme Kerr, Roxanne Zetzman, Chad Draheim, Annette Koenig, Patrick Roe, Julie Morse, Amy Howerton, Crystal Miller, IIene Loomis, Bonnie O’Brien and Jody Millin.

The project team would also like to extend a heartfelt “thank you” to the students and staff who contributed their time to this project. Special thanks to the following people and their colleagues who assisted them:

• Center Staff: Linda Williams, Cindy Douglas, Linda Bahr, Diana Paynter, Pat Johnson, Travis Teigen, Dawn Way and Tina Ahedo
• MAACE Staff: Kelly Ratliff
• Regional Campus Staff: Cindy Bowen, Sue Kotur, Linda Fehd and Patti Fuhrman.
• Enrollment Center Staff: Danielle Dahlke

We couldn’t have done it without you! 

We welcome your feedback. Please contact sekelley[at] matcmadison [dot] edu (Sharon Kelley).