A recently launched student record system that was custom built by software engineers in University of Iowa Information Technology Services got a good workout in the first week of classes, and is performing extremely well.

MAUI—short for Made at the University of Iowa—manages vast amounts of data and transactions, including financial aid and billing, registration, transcripts and degree audits, communications with current and prospective students, and much more.

Several major modules of the new system came online in 2012, and the last big pieces—modules for financial aid and billing—went into production mid-spring. Fall of 2013 marked the first full-blown start-of-semester experience for the fully implemented record system.

Some start-of-semester stats:

ISIS (Iowa Student Information System) Week 1:

• 17,000 students used the new add/drop feature in the student self-service portal, which allows them to electronically add or drop courses during the first five days of the semester. The students added over 10,000 courses and dropped over 9,300.

Billing Week 1:

• Assessed $77 million in resident tuition for 16,202 students, $154 million in nonresident tuition for 13,784 students, and $4 million in tuition for 1,205 online students.
• Processed 54,423 U-bills for 29,342 students, 10,088 employees, and about 15,000 others.

Fall 2013 Financial Aid:

• Awarded approximately $72 million in loans and $75 million in grants and scholarships to 19,457 students. These funds came from over 1,000 unique sources.

“This was our first new academic year with the all MAUI components live, and the system performed great,” says Mike Noel, senior director of ITS-Administrative Information Systems. “The staff that developed and support MAUI did a tremendous job making sure everything went smoothly, and we are grateful for everyone’s hard work.”

Development efforts for MAUI kicked off in 2006, after the university investigated vended solutions to replace its 30-year-old record system and discovered that the products on the market didn’t meet all of the institution’s needs. In building MAUI, developers used the existing student self-service portal (ISIS) as a basis, but addressed technical limitations of the old systems with a more contemporary interface, better integration with other systems, and additional features and functionality.

In a year’s time, MAUI manages 1 million communications for 340,000 prospective students and applicants, and 4,500 first-year students. It facilitates the disbursement of $300 million in financial aid and the collection of $450 million in tuition, fees, and charges. Registration can generate up to a million transactions per day.

To read a related story, see Hello MAUI, goodnight mainframe.