What are the procedures involved in registration?

A typical registration procedure begins with the mailing of reminder letters to inactive students. Reregistration forms must be sent to current students so that they can apply for the coming semester. A system must be devised for determining priorities in allocating students among courses with a limited number of places. Offer letters and fee payment forms must be sent. And all procedures must be designed to be conducted at a distance, since many applicants will be unable to attend registration in person.

The Hong Kong Open University (formerly the Open Learning Institute) mail-in registration system uses ORACLE, a relational data base, for file management. The student database contains 60,000 student records, taking up 900 megabytes (MB) of disk space. Reregistration forms are processed by an Optical Mark Reader, which can handle 3,000 an hour. Applicants select tutorial classes by telephone using an interactive voice response system.