Ramportal

Historical Notes (Any notes entered into myWCU up to 8/1/2024) 

• The historical notes from myWCU are being moved to RamPortal Advising Notes. This move takes place from 8/1 – 8/16
• Students can see these: Link will be available when historical notes have moved, approximately by 8/16
• Faculty/Staff can see these:  Link will be available when historical notes have moved, approximately by 8/16 

Current Notes (Any notes entered 8/2/2024 onward) 

• Enter all notes in Degree Audit Notes 
• Faculty staff can enter them degree audit. Instructions available here:   Advising Notes How to Access View and Edit.docx 
• Students can see them on their degree audit.  

We decided not to use RamPortal advising notes for two primary reasons: 

Banner does not natively make advisor notes accessible for everyone to see. Meaning that it isn’t automatic that students would be able to see notes advisors entered, or other faculty would be able to see notes entered by a colleague. Therefore, WCU would need to develop and run a process to run a mass update on all notes entered to make them viewable by students and others. This has a higher risk of delays in making notes available and has a risk of errors.  

Banner advising notes are available on the student profile, but aren’t natively accessible from the student’s curriculum in the degree audit. This means that students and advisors would need to go to two different places to see curricular requirements and course selection recommendations. This felt burdensome to students and advisors.  

For these reasons we opted to make the degree audit notes the location of advising notes moving forward.  

We heard from campus partners that retaining advising notes in an easily acceptable location was critical. We were committed to finding a path forward to retaining historical advising note information. While we knew the degree audit notes would be the best tool moving forward, the degree audit does accept any migrated/historical data. WCU learned that there was no way to move historical data from myWCU in the degree audit notes. Therefore if we wanted to have historical advising notes in our new system, we would need to put them someplace other than the degree audit. 

We have heard that some of the documents attached to advisor notes in myWCU are important to retain. Unfortunately, there is not a mechanism to migrate attachments into RamPortal. Therefore, we are actively looking into where else we can store attachments for reference. This exploration is underway and we will aim to have an alternative location before we remove faculty/staff access to view advising notes in myWCU. 

• Training for RamPortal will be on going through out Fall 2024. Please review our Training Website (link to training) for more information 
• AES and the Workstream leads will coordinate security needs for faculty and staff
• All other requests will remain the same via the AES Service Portal

• This is being reviewed to see if something is available that falls within the current FERPA guidelines

• This will vary on the data elements, but will be provided to campus in a functional sheet as the conversions happen
• Example: All academic history for all WCU students will be preserved; but application history will be limited.
• Learn more by visiting our historical data website.

• Some historical data from myWCU will be preserved in external systems even if not part of the RamPortal conversions. 

• The RamPortal url is https://ramportal.wcupa.edu
• Login using your WCU credentials (user name and password).
• For faculty and staff when off-campus: When accessing secure areas of RamPortal it is required to use an encrypted connection provided by a Virtual Private Network (VPN). The VPN ensures that your connection to the server is secure, and that sensitive data is protected. More info on How to Connect to WCU's VPN.

• Please see our historical data website for the most up to date information about where historical data will be accessible, and what data we anticipate no longer maintaining access to: https://www.wcupa.edu/academicEnterpriseSystems/ramportal/historical-data.aspx

• This data is now available in SAS using the same dashboards. 

• At our initial go-live there will very limited reports available for users. If you need data please submit a Data Request Form.

• This is still a fluid timeline with view only access a possibility. There is expectation to remove transactional access from myWCU as we go live with the Fall 2024 semester.
• On 2/1 staff and faculty will lose access to completing the following functions in myWCU, as a result of the conversion of data to RamPortal:
• Holds
• Advisor Assignments
• Updates to major/minor, etc.
• Change of grade
• Posting transfer credit
• Applying for graduation after summer 24
• Petition process (for terms prior to spring 24)
• Updating academic standing
• Conferring degrees
• Academic Forgiveness processing
• Residency updates
• Student test scores
• Student milestones

• The listing of students by either their IDs or First Names is standard Banner functionality. With the move to a cloud hosted environment, West Chester does not have the ability to edit this configuration. We are working on creating reports that will allow the sorting of students by last name, but this will not be possible for the advisee lists or class rosters accessed from the Faculty Center Card.  

• The two-step login process for reports within the Argos component is related to single sign-on and security. We recognize the extra steps that this requires of our end users and will be investigating enhancements this year.