OCC working out kinks in online registration

Kristin Clark didn’t get much sleep Monday night.

If the rest of the week was going to be like Monday for OCC’s dean of enrollment services, she would qualify as an insomniac.

The college’s new online registration and enrollment tool, MyOCC, made a disappointing debut for many students and faculty members. But by Friday, Clark said everything was in working order, and she was sleeping just fine.

“The log-in took forever. The old way was easier,” said student Phong Nguyen.

It turns out a simple but important setting on MyOCC could cause or cure the system’s problems, Clark said.

The college’s trouble-shooting team changed the timeout setting — how long someone could remain idly logged onto the system — from four hours to 20 minutes.

Students were logging onto MyOCC and not logging out. Without clicking on “log out” or closing all browser windows, students remain logged into the system, taking up available slots on the server, Clark said.

For the first time in OCC’s history, enrollment and registration went all-electronic in the fall. MyOCC logged on Nov. 13 and for a while seemed to be going smoothly. Thousands of students districtwide were registering for classes with few, if any problems, officials said. But this week, specifically the first couple of days of the spring semester, MyOCC was tested.

More than 21,000 students were registered for spring classes at OCC, officials said. Coast Community College’s online system is supposed to handle that, but had some troubles with waves of students checking schedules and petitioning early on. Golden West College, OCC and Coastline Community College use the system.

“We just couldn’t test for that many people at one time,” Clark said. “[The company] said we’d be OK. But maybe they didn’t really understand completely.”

Rachel Satoh, 18, said she tried logging on once every 10 minutes for almost an hour to double-check her class schedule. She ultimately went with “the old-fashioned way” and grabbed a course catalog and wrote them down, she said.

“I think whenever you start out with something new there’s going to be problems but in the end it will all work out,” said Jill Golden, a nutrition professor.

“We got a list of different options that we’re still looking and talking through,” Clark said. “We will be fully ready before the next registration cycle.”

JOSEPH SERNA may be reached at (714) 966-4619 or at joseph.serna@latimes.com.