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October 26, 2010

Aboriginal Self-Identification Channel for Students

The Aboriginal Self-Identification channel is a new way for students to tell the university more about themselves. One of the university's many student experience initiatives is to better understand the needs of our Aboriginal students. The university uses two sources for self-identification. The first is during the admissions process and the second is through the Education Equity Form available in PAWS. (If you declared your Aboriginal status to your college, Aboriginal Students Centre or for scholarships, that information is not used in institutional statistics.)

Self-identification is completely voluntary but helps the university determine what programs and services are important to you. Self-identification also guides decisions about academic programs and student supports such as scholarships and co-curricular programming that meet your needs and expectations.

If you haven't yet self-identified, we encourage you to log into PAWS and click on the Academics tab. There, you'll find the Aboriginal Self-Identification channel in the right-hand column, with a link to the form where you can self identify as well as a link to a fact sheet with more information about this initiative.

As always, you can get help with anything PAWS related by contacting the ITS Help Desk. We welcome your feedback, so please send us your comments or suggestions.

October 12, 2010

New My Textbooks Channel

The University of Saskatchewan Bookstore has set up shop in PAWS -- with a handy link in students' and instructors' class homepages, and through a new channel on the Academics tab.

In the left-hand Course Tools menu within your individual class homepages, you'll see a "Buy Books" link. Clicking this link will take you directly to the list of texts for that particular class on the Bookstore’s Online Text Sales web page, where you can see full details about the texts or purchase them online.

A new channel on the Academics tab, "My Textbooks" shows students and instructors a personalized list of classes for which they are registered or are teaching. By clicking the class links, you can expand the channel to show the textbooks assigned for each class. A button at the top of the channel takes you to the Bookstore's Online Text Sales web page with customized information about the texts assigned for all of your classes. The page even lists how many copies of each text are currently available so you don't need to make a trip to find out whether your texts are in the store.

As always, you can get help with anything PAWS related by contacting the ITS Help Desk. We welcome your feedback, so please send us your comments or suggestions.