The Binghamton University Division of Student Affairs has created a Web site to help Binghamton students put together a co-curricular transcript in an efficient and orderly fashion.
B-Involved, which was initiated as part of the BU Web site by Brian Rose, vice president for Student Affairs, aims to generate all student-run extra-curricular activities on campus in order to design a credible document that students can print like a transcript.
According to Grace Fama, program coordinator for Leadership Development and Campus Activities, before working with CollegiateLink — the site with which B-Involved was created — Student Affairs considered similar sites, including OrgSync, and considered creating its own co-curricular transcript system, where students could just enter their own information.
In the summer of 2009, the decision was made by Student Affairs to create a site using CollegiateLink through StudentVoice, an assessment tool already signed to Student Affairs.
Many facets of CollegiateLink make the site appealing to students searching for different ways to engage in campus life, Rose said.
According to Rose, the site contains a public flyer-board that gives members of campus clubs the opportunity to post upcoming events and updated announcements that will keep BU students notified of new opportunities.
“Through B-Involved, students can log in using their BU Brain user name and password and easily keep track of their campus involvement and quickly generate a co-curricular transcript of all the extra-curricular activities they partake in throughout their college careers,” Rose said.
“Organizations are a part of your college experience that you can print on a transcript,” he said.
Student Affairs holds information about campus-organization membership and thus, according to Rose, its site benefits BU alumni by allowing them to easily reconnect with others who were previously, or are currently, involved in the same groups.
Currently, Student Association-chartered clubs are excluded from the list of organizations on the site, like fraternities and sororities, which have membership information pre-formulated, and students who wish to print Student Association-chartered organizations on this transcript must self-insert their membership information.
With the exception of Student Association-chartered clubs, all organization involvement is validated by the University.
Student Association Executive Vice President Jared Kirschenbaum said that the SA chose not to release the information of its chartered organizations to the Office of Student Affairs.
According to Kirschenbaum, if the SA provided them with membership information for B-Involved, the administration would gain complete access to the information of each member involved in Student Association organizations, which could create a legal issue for the SA.
Kirschenbaum provided examples of groups that exist based on the anonymity of their members, including High Hopes, the crisis hotline on campus.
With about 200 existing student organizations, there would also be “a lot of student membership to verify,” Fama said.
Aside from legal issues, there are other motives keeping the Student Association independent from the Student Affairs site.
According to Kirschenbaum, the benefits of B-Involved are already available on the SA’s PAWS software — also powered by CollegiateLink — which accumulates all of its chartered student organizations.
“Student Affairs is currently working with the Student Association to perfect the transcript-design site,” Fama said.
According to Rose, “The site is functioning, but formatting is still in the works.”
Visit the B-Involved link at www2.binghamton.edu/student-affairs/ and PAWS at paws.binghamton.edu.
— Melissa Bykofsky contributed to this report