Contact: Claire Wagner
wagnercm@muohio.edu
office: (513) 529-7592

OXFORD, Ohio – More than 3.7 million college students in the U.S. and Canada can tell if they’re on the right path to graduating thanks to software developed and marketed by a team at Miami University. DARS, Degree Audit Reporting System, is offered at 329 colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada. With many of those schools gathered at the DARS Annual User’s Conference in Lake Tahoe, Nev., today, June 17, DARS officials announced a name change, to redLantern. RedLantern is a non-profit, auxiliary department within Miami University that develops software solutions for the education market.

RedLantern will offer a campus suite of solutions that includes u.achieve, u.select and u.direct. The campus suite will replace the products formerly known as DARwin, CAS (Course Applicability System) and DCP (Degree Completion Planner). Along with the new names, each solution within the campus suite will offer several product enhancements.

U.achieve is the degree audit reporting tool that leads the market in adoption and functionality. The u.achieve application will be a Java-based solution, compared to the COBOL-based DARwin product. Already well received at client colleges and universities, this change will provide greater flexibility and capabilities for future features. An Illinois client said, “Trying to summarize what this software means to our campus in one sentence is next to impossible. This has made it much easier for the students to graduate in a timely fashion with fewer problems.”

Jenna Jackson, a 2007 gr­aduate of Wright State University in Dayton, echoed the value of DARS. “I had transferred. DARS lined up my general education requirements for Wright State, so I knew what I had to do. It was very helpful keeping me on track with my major, and I graduated early,” said Jackson.

U.select is a course transfer system allowing students to view course equivalencies, degree programs and request planning guides from institutions participating in the network. The u.select Web site, www.transfer.org, is expected to go live in August.

U.direct is a planning tool intended to help students build a detailed term-by-term, multi-year plan for graduation. Students along with advisors can develop an academic plan that meets their graduation goals. It provides institutions the tools and information to plan for course demand and classroom scheduling, resulting in greater student retention and facility management. U.direct completes the campus suite allowing students to plan, assess and take appropriate action to complete their graduation requirements.

“We are very excited with the direction we are taking with redLantern,” said Jason Elwood, director. “We believe that redLantern will be recognized as the premier software provider for the education market by continuing to work closely with institutions to deliver campus solutions.”

To find out more about redLantern, visit the new website at www.redLanternU.com.

Background:
Started in 1983 at Miami to provide students with a tool for helping them track their coursework to degree completion, and licensed to other universities starting in 1985, DARS provides a dynamic, concise report, viewed in hard copy and on the Web, that is used for advising as well as for final certification. RedLantern will build on the successful features of DARS.