Web services available to students may seem intimidating at first, but are actually quite helpful

Mike Treadgold

As you have probably already discovered, the University of Guelph has a number of online services that are critical for your education. These services are all private and password protected, and can be accessed by using your ‘central login ID’ (the letters in front of your @uoguelph.ca email address) and a password assigned by the university, which can be changed at your own discretion. Protect this password like you would with any other as it is your private access key to your online services.

Familiarize yourself with the various online services offered at the University of Guelph. The services are provided and maintained by the Computing and Communications Services (CCS), a group that puts accessibility and ease of use at the forefront.

“The best way students can begin to familiarize themselves with the CCS services is to check out the videos on our website, www.uoguelph.ca/ccs,” said Cort Egan from the CCS Communications Committee. “The ‘First Visit’ link makes for a great jumping off point, so students can get to know what’s available. If they follow the tutorials and use the services well, it can save students a lot of time.”

Start with Gryph Mail, your personal email account that will effectively be your communication lifeline as a student. Familiarize yourself with its settings and functions at an early stage and understand that you check it every day. Every student, professor and employee of the university has a Gryph Mail address and it should be viewed as your primary form of communication with fellow University of Guelphites.

Secondly, you need to understand Web Advisor. Web Advisor, as you likely already know, is the program that you use to select and drop courses, pay bills, view class and exam schedules, view grades and check out your overall progress as a university student.

Web Advisor is highly accessible and easy to use, and you will quickly recognize its importance. Arguably, its most important function is as a tool to allow you to register for semesterly classes. Each class has a maximum number of students allowed to enrol each semester without a great deal of leniency afforded to students who want to enrol after the maximum has been reached.

Hopefully you’re not too overwhelmed yet, because the third and final critical component to your online University of Guelph experience has a much more practical educational element to it: Courselink. 

Virtually every class that you take in university has a related course website, located via Courselink. Professors will use Courselink to varying degrees; some will make it an integral feature for the class, while others may not utilize its features whatsoever. If you are taking Distance Education classes (the courses where all your learning is done online and you don’t attend an actual classroom), you will find that these classes use Couselink a lot.

Much of Courselink’s offerings relate to your individual work; electronic copies of notes, lecture slides, assignments and course readings are all at your fingertips.

Other services offered free for students include software updates, downloads, anti-virus programs and assistance in connecting their internet in residence.