By Ethan Tait
Your routine probably looks like this: you go to your advisory every morning and check the ManageBac messages that were sent to your email (despite having probably over 100+ unread ManageBac notifications). As you’re panicking to submit a summative because you forgot that it’s due after school and you lost track of time, you go to ManageBac to submit your task and hope that your teacher was kind enough to not lock submissions for said summative. When it’s noon on August 4th, you go to ManageBac to anxiously check if any of your friends are in the same class as you. The point is, ManageBac is a significant part of a student’s life, unlike a website you might not have heard of in a while: MyCIS.
Now, if you’ve been on CIS for quite some time, you might be saying “Oh yeah, MyCIS! I forgot about that”, which is a suitable reaction. However, if you’re new and have barely any idea what I’m talking about, I don’t blame you. It’s really old. Anyways, an interesting situation involving MyCIS occurred quite some time ago. Amidst the flow of ManageBac messages, task updates, and promotional emails from companies in Gmail inbox, there was a stone that diverged the river to go around it; an outlier. That stone was an email that all of you should have received some time ago; an email detailing the school’s discontinuation of Microsoft services. Now, the email itself wasn’t really that shocking (I mean, I don’t know any students who used Microsoft’s services). But what made it so interesting was that it was posted on MyCIS, before being sent through Gmail.
Ever since the adoption of ManageBac, MyCIS has lain in the shadows cast by ManageBac and Gmail, rotting quietly. So the question is, what do we do with MyCIS? Should we end its misery, put it back in the spotlight, let it co-exist with ManageBac, or make it exclusive to parents/teachers? That is what we’re gonna investigate.
MyCIS: What is it?
In case you’re new and don’t really know what I’m talking about, here I will provide context for this article. MyCIS was (and still is, to some extent) the school’s website for, well, everything! It’s like ManageBac but CIS-branded. It was where students once submitted their tasks, got their grades, and opened important messages from their teachers. But those were the golden, olden days of MyCIS. CIS experimented with other platforms before choosing ManageBac and migrating everything there. Nowadays, MyCIS is in limbo, being pretty much used by parents to pay for C/ECAs and read the Week at a Glance updates (WAGs). Unsurprisingly, since everything is on ManageBac, almost no students use MyCIS. Interestingly though, MyCIS contains course outlines for each grade level’s courses, including DP courses. In fact, I daresay that the majority of the students in this school don’t even have MyCIS bookmarked or shortcutted despite the ‘importance’ of it. Now this leads to the question for this article; what should we do with it?
What to do with it?
There are four options we can consider; ending its misery, replacing ManageBac, making MyCIS exclusive for parents/teachers, or letting the two continue to coexist. We’ll address these one by one.
Although pulling its plug sounds like a good idea, there are some complications behind that. Even though barely anyone uses it, where are parents going to pay for their children’s C/ECAs? Where are parents going to receive WAG updates? We need to consider those factors before we get rid of MyCIS. We could send the payment forms and WAGs to parents on Gmail, but it would be cumbersome to send them to every single parent at CIS…
Alternatively (and this is the option that would make the least sense in my opinion), MyCIS could replace ManageBac. However, ManageBac already has so much useful programming, compared to MyCIS. It has a better user interface, and website navigation, and can even generate report cards automatically (very convenient).
Another possibility would be to make MyCIS exclusive for parents and teachers, which sounds like a good idea considering MyCIS isn’t heavily used by the student body. However, this would put students at a disadvantage, especially those going into the DP, as MyCIS contains course outlines for DP courses including who’s teaching it, the units covered (this is important because some subjects have multiple units that teachers can choose to teach), and the weightage of different assessments for their final grades.
Finally, MyCIS could continue to coexist with ManageBac, which is the most viable option right now. MyCIS is still used by parents to make payments and by teachers to share information with various students.
Final Verdict
Personally, I feel like MyCIS should be taken off the plug. It’s been rotting in purgatory ever since ManageBac stole its limelight to the point where it’s basically dead. When was the last time you used MyCIS? Exactly. That’s my point. Other than that, I feel like making MyCIS exclusive to parents and teachers would be a good option. As for the students, a weekly update could be sent on ManageBac similar to the WAGs. For the course outlines, maybe the admins could send them directly to each grade level before the school year begins. Either way, one thing is for certain; MyCIS is on life support right now and the admins are the doctors; they can decide to pull the plug or to continue letting it exist in this state. We’re just the family in the middle, merely witnesses of this situation.