SNU Office of Information Systems & Technology renewed the school portal site (http://my.snu.ac.kr) in December of last year. Most notable about the new portal site is the simplicity of its design."The former site's design was over-complicated. The site was not easy to read at first sight and wasted lots of system resources," the Office of IS&T explained.

Since the renewal of the portal site, some students have complained of experiencing difficulties logging in though. In response, the Office of IS&T explained,"Unlike the former site, one has to type the address 'my.snu.ac.kr' in order to log in. If one types 'mysnu.ac.kr' without the period after 'my', he or she won't be able to log in. We changed the system this way so that we could make all university sites' domain names end with '.snu.ac.kr'."

HAN Young Taek, director of the Division of Information Services said,"Our efforts to tighten the site's security and streamline the domain names for better connection between the sites have resulted in some unexpected problems. We will take heed of all complaints and gradually improve the site."

In addition to renewing the portal, SNU officially launched the new eTL (e-Teaching and Learning) site (http://etl.snu.ac.kr) on March 2. The former eTL site generated many complaints from students because it was slow and the connection was unstable.

The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) commented:"We successfully concluded the trial stage of the new eTL site during the winter vacation. There won't be any complaints like before because the new eTL is faster and simpler."

A member of the CTL e-Learning Support Team stressed the advantages of the new eTL site, saying that"The former eTL site used the 'Blackboard' platform, for which we had to pay license fees. However, the new site uses an open source platform called 'Moodle', so the cost of managing and developing the site is considerably reduced."

Written by JANG Hyo Jeong, SNU English Editor, fatalbonds@snu.ac.kr  ?
Reviewed by Eli Park Sorensen, SNU Professor of Liberal Studies, eps7257@snu.ac.kr
Proofread by Brett Johnson, SNU English Editor, morningcalm2@gmail.com