University of Belize Faces Backlash After Registration Platform Crashes, Administrators Scramble to Resolve Issues

The University of Belize (UB) registration platform known as Xenegrade crashed on July 31 as the new cohort of associate level students were required to register. The institution came under fire from angry students as they attempted to register on a platform that was not running at all for a little over 12 hours. In an effort to address this, a letter was issued by the President of the University, Dr. Vincent Palacio, stating that the university had been trying their best to fix the problem. Today, another press release was issued regarding registration and Love News got the opportunity to speak with the Dean of Student Affairs, Dr. Martin Cuellar, about the progress they have made in communicating with the company owning the Xenegrade platform out of Miami, USA to not have this problem repeat itself for the upcoming January semester.

Dr.Martin Cuellar, Dean of Student Affairs, University of Belize: “I really feel very strongly that our students have a right and they should have demanded better. As we said in the press release, this is the time for us to kind of reconvene, collect all of our best minds and resources, and address this problem in a multi-pronged manner to make sure that we overcome this challenge once and for all. We’ve had about 4,500 students already register. Right now, students have started classes as of yesterday and they are now doing drop-add. But during the drop-add, we still have issues to address. Students still have concerns or questions about maybe making changes in their registration. For that, they need some form of support and we have the staff in the records office are working overtime to address those kinds of requests for change. Students will notice that if they send in their requests by email to records at UB that someone is responding to that within a couple of hours. Similarly, our faculty are all on board responding to emails coming in from students for that kind of assistance. We have made the decision to waive all late fees that normally would have been added at this time because we know that some students might be registering late because of some of these issues that they faced last week.”

More faculty and staff from the university have been brought on board to assist with advising this semester to ensure that all students get into their required classes. Dr. Cuellar echoed that despite the financial implications, they are making long term plans to address the registration woes once and for all without directly affecting students’ fees this academic year.

Dr.Martin Cuellar, Dean of Student Affairs, University of Belize: “Our current emergency response team is looking specifically at those numbers, and we are already making plans to change the way we address registration coming up for the January semester. So one key difference, for example, is for us to reintroduce pre-registration which would be around October but which is usually done in a much more leisurely manner, which means that less students would be on the portal in a given day. Another approach, don’t forget, is for us to change the entire system, which then can have a higher ceiling day by day. So those are two approaches to make sure that the number of students is, well it’s not the number of students that’s the problem, that’s never a problem. Our job is to provide education for as many qualified Belizeans as possible. So the problem is that we have to make sure the portal can address the number of students we’re taking care of. Focusing on being smarter rather than being necessarily more expensive. So it’s really reconfiguring the technology, looking at other unique and innovative ways that we could address the same systems. And yes, eventually for example, in the long term we may have to pay for a completely different portal. But that would be the kind of expense that will see itself built in to the overall annual growth and development of the university. So every year it has been costing us more to run the university but our students have continued to enjoy the same tuition and the same fees for the past 15 years and so I don’t think that any of our current Jaguars need to be particularly concerned about any kind of tuition increases that are caused specifically because of these upgrades. Ultimately at some point we will have to revisit our overall tuition and fee structure, but it won’t be because of this and it won’t necessarily be in the next year.”

The registration late fees for this semester have been dropped due to the discrepancy being on the part of the university.