The University of Helsinki’s new student information Sisu is now available to students, teachers and those implementing academic administration.
Sisu is a highly diverse primary system for academic administration: it is linked to dozens of other systems and supports numerous processes related to studying and teaching. Students can use Sisu in various ways, such as to create a study plan, register for courses, view course grades and apply for a degree certificate.
The deployment of Sisu was a huge and challenging task that required extensive preparations. The previous Oodi system had to be replaced because it had reached the end of its technical lifecycle and its maintenance will conclude at the end of this year. The data transferred to Sisu encompassed some 10 million completed credits, 2.3 million study rights and 450,000 individuals.
“The system switchover secured the management of student information, which is critical for the University’s core operations,” says Kati Kettunen, director of Services for Teaching and Learning Environments.
Development of Sisu to continue
At present, only the features required by the system migration are available in Sisu in full. Data transferred from Oodi to Sisu may currently appear deficient or erroneous. We can assure you that all data remain intact, and related issues will be corrected in the coming weeks.
“A system migration of this scale always requires some fixes. If the situation is not urgent, we advise students to wait until the autumn. However, if a student is about to graduate and notices that their personal details are deficient or erroneous, they should contact Student Services. The services are expected to be congested, but students about to graduate will be given priority,” Kettunen points out.
Because the Sisu logic differs considerably from that of Oodi, we advise everyone to allocate enough time to learn how to use the new system.
Now that Sisu is the primary system for academic administration, its further development and wider utilisation will be easier. In the next stage, a central goal is to add features that will improve the accessibility of the system. For further information on the accessibility of Sisu, please see our earlier news article.
Background
Sisu, the Student Information System for Finnish Universities, is an academic administration system jointly used by students, teachers and those implementing academic administration. Together with six other higher education institutions, the University of Helsinki owns Funidata Oy, which develops Sisu on the basis of feedback provided by its owner institutions and user experience. In developing Sisu, Funidata takes into consideration the needs of all seven higher education institutions.
Sisu was deployed at the University of Helsinki on 31 May 2021. Oodi, the old system, has reached the end of its technical lifespan, and its maintenance will end at the end of 2021.
Sisu was previously introduced at Tampere University, the University of Jyväskylä and LUT University. After the University of Helsinki, the next institutions to deploy Sisu will be Aalto University and the Hanken School of Economics.
Sisu will first enable increasingly agile teaching collaboration within the University and, later, with other higher education institutions that are using Sisu. As processes and concepts associated with academic administration are standardised, students will be able to more easily find and identify, through their personal study plans, courses that can be completed in other degree programmes or at other universities.
At the University of Helsinki, some 10 million completed credits, 2.3 million study rights and the data of 450,000 individuals will be transferred from the Oodi system to Sisu.
In accordance with the Act on the Provision of Digital Services (306/2019), institution-specific accessibility statements have been drawn up for Sisu, describing the challenges relating to the system’s accessibility and the timetable for fixing them. The University of Helsinki’s accessibility statement for Sisu outlines serious accessibility issues, including the inaccessibility of some features by using keyboard commands as well as certain challenges and inconsistencies in using the system with the help of a screen reader. The challenges identified in terms of accessibility are in the process of being fixed.
