Earlier this fall semester, Michigan Tech students registered for the spring 2026 semester using the new Ellucian Experience software for the first time. This marks an end to Banweb’s reign as the main portal to access university-related resources and information, passing the torch to Experience, which is intended to provide a smoother user experience and give online users more powerful tools to work with.
Senior Emilie Scholie was one of the first students to use the new software for registration. She said that “when I first started using Experience, I didn’t really like it,” but after becoming acquainted with new features such as Plan Ahead, she found that it was “a lot easier” than Banweb. Combined with a streamlined degree audit, she misses only the “familiarity” of the aging Banweb system.
Evan Meyer, a student employee at the Rozsa Center, uses Experience from an employee’s perspective rather than a registering student. He views the new user interface as “pretty decent,” though familiarity with Banweb makes it “feel like a pointless change.” Cumbersome menus and unintuitively nested pages for timesheet submission were named as primary concerns.
Students may be unaware of many new features coming with Experience. Dashboard cards like Classes and Class Schedule are examples of how Experience can provide at-a-glance data to the user without requiring them to log into Student Registration or Employee Self Service. Assistant Director of Enterprise Application Services Shellie Hubert said that “Ellucian continues to develop these cards, so keep an eye out for new features.” Among others, coming features include a new student advising software that will combine Advising, Degree Works, and Student Registration together for a more natural flow between advising and registration.
Switching over to Experience has been years in the making. Hubert says, “This project has taken us a couple of years to prepare.” Following the first rollout of Self Service Experience features in April 2025, “this fall was picked as the time to cut everyone over to only using Experience and the new Self Service systems.” The motivation for the switch was a combined student-faculty desire to “make the experience better for everyone in the university community.”
Banweb still hosts a number of pages that are developed by MTU in-house. The IT department “will be moving those to our apps.mtu.edu platform over time. Note that as the remaining Banweb features are converted, we will update the links in Experience, and you will automatically be directed to the new location.”
IT conducts an annual user satisfaction survey during the Spring Semester. This year’s survey will be updated to collect data on the newly rolled-out Experience systems. Additionally, immediate feedback can be submitted directly through Experience under the Resources section titled “Share your Feedback – Help us make Experience better.” These are the surest ways to inform the university about what is and isn’t working for students.
