Start of term password "wash up"

Started today with an hour to discuss the problems that some students faced with changing and remembering passwords prior to and at the start of term. Over 1,600 password changes recorded out of a total of 5000 new students through the pre-enrolment portal. That's over 30% but then you could always say that 70% managed without a hitch. As with these things as we discussed the issues we discovered that there were a number of different reasons why ranging from technical glitches (data transfers not working quite right), delays in fixing problems not instantaenous (leading to multiple duplicate requests), international students not understanding our messages (especially chinese students whichwere then translated), students not understanding instructions and just clicking (easy to see why that might happen) and then other issues about communication. I suppose we have made a good start in the problem definition and getting to some of the root causes so now we can move foreward with some potential innovative solutions. Target for next year is less than 100 (there will still be at least 100 students I guess who cannote deal with this technology thing).