Ryerson students can navigate their way to classes with ease now that their course timetables show up on the Google Calendar app.
The Google timetable, courtesy of Ryerson’s Computing and Communications Services (CCS), conveniently displays the lectures, labs and tutorials associated with every student’s course-load, including the course code, section, instructor and room number for each class or event.
“We want to encourage the use of (Google) Calendar and so decided to populate people’s individual calendars with their course info,” said Jim Buchanan, CCS assistant director of client services.
Although Google Calendar has been available to all students and faculty since Ryerson’s switch to Gmail last year, CCS just finished processing everyone’s information from RAMSS and adding it to the application.
Avnish Patel, a Ryerson business student, said he came across his course schedule on his Google Calendar by chance and was pleasantly surprised to find it had synched with his phone.
“It basically reminds me an hour before my class, so I no longer have to go into my Ryerson app they have for phones. I simply just look on my calendar on my phone,” he said.
Google’s package of apps is a well-worn tool for Patel, who says the resources often help him manage collaborative assignments.
“I think it’s great,” he said. “I use … Google (Drive) and all that stuff with my groups and projects, so for Ryerson to automatically group up with Google and give us all these services without having to make a separate email … it makes it really convenient.”
Buchanan said building an email and calendar service as sophisticated as Google’s from scratch would have been a costly and complicated venture for the university. Ryerson also plans to roll out Google Groups and Google Sites within the next couple of months.
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