****WARNING – This is much longer than my usual posts. But I promise you that it is very informational ***

I can’t believe that we have been using Workday Student for the past three years. I thought this is a good time to reflect on how far we have come. Why now? Because we have recently rolled out some exciting functions in Workday Student that took a lot of effort on the part of the Registrar’s office and LTS. And we are happy to see that it has been received well by our students and faculty. 

I often get asked the question “I keep hearing that Workday Student doesn’t have all the functionalities of a Student Information System, how are you all doing”. My answer is “We have matriculated three classes, we have graduated two classes, our students have registered successfully at least 14 times, we have been producing transcripts for the past two years from Workday, students have been viewing their financial statements and students or parents have been paying the bills, we use it for functions we never had before, such as waitlisting, prerequisite checking etc. so it is working just fine for us. By the way, which SIS provides you EVERYTHING you want anyways?”

In short, I would say that Workday Student is a net positive for us compared to what we had before. I will also be honest to say that for a handful of things, we have found workarounds to accomplish what we want while waiting for Workday to provide us the solutions. But this is clearly our strategy – let us put on our creative hats and see how best to provide our community what they need in whatever ways we can make it happen. Our most recent application that I referred to briefly in the opening paragraph is a good example of that. 

The way we manage Major/Minor declaration, approval, review of academic plan and their graduation requirements has some unique processes to the College that we do not want to make changes to. Whereas what Workday has modeled for Academic Plan and Academic Progress may be applicable to several other institutions, we will need configurability to achieve what we need. We have made it known and it is our understanding that we will get there, but we needed a solution sooner. We found a perfect workaround for this using a low code platform called Workday Extend – where the application is easier to develop than how we do it now and the app looks exactly like any other task or report in Workday!

I want to highlight a few items regarding our Workday Student implementation that are worthy of a special mention. The list is too long, so I have tried hard to bring out the most important ones:

Registration – We use the saved schedules feature in Workday which allows a student to put together one or more set of courses they wish to register in. We prefer they have just one, but they ignore us! The advantages are, you can create them before the registration and the system informs you whether it is clean or not. In other words, if your selected sections have time conflicts, prerequisite violations or other violations of restrictions (for eg. no seats available for first years and you are one) you are informed immediately so that you can revise your selections to get to a nice and clean set. Then, the advantage is, you click once and you are enrolled in all sections where seats are available all at once. This has resulted in a very high level of satisfaction for students. The data that can be gathered from which saved schedules were used to register, combined with the failed registrations as well as waitlists can be a powerful source for future course planning.

We request appropriate resource allocation before each registration and we have not had any performance issues so far. In fact, I am fond of saying that 600 students complete most of their registrations within 30 seconds from the time registration opens.

Our Registrar’s office has several reports they can use to troubleshoot any reported issues much faster than before. Since Workday provides data at a microsecond resolution (I complain that I need it at nanosecond resolution!), we can see and explain to the students (some are not happy) why they missed getting in the class. They missed it by a few microseconds (trust me, we don’t go into this level of detail with a disappointed student!). We can also get a lot of additional analytics such as the time taken for registration by students, how many sections from saved schedules resulted in success vs failures etc.

Waitlist – Prior to Workday, we were using our own waitlist system to accommodate the requirements of our faculty. We switched to Workday for waitlist and the number of sections using the Workday waitlist shot up. Almost 50% of all sections now use the Workday waitlist. Whereas most are first come first serve, for a few sections, we give complete control for the instructor to modify the waitlist order. The only missing piece is a technically challenging one.  What exactly do you do when you have multiple lecture/lab sections. Which of these should trump the waitlist. I am not going to get into the details here, but willing to discuss with anyone the complexities of this. We are encouraged that Workday is going to provide us with some options to handle this situation.

Academic Progress Report – Whereas we had a robust homegrown system that tracked the progress towards the completion of general requirements, due to the complex nature of major/minor requirements, it was left to the advisors and department/program chairs to inform the students of their progress based on a plan that student developed. There was no automated evaluation. Our team spent a lot of time to translate what requirements are in the catalog and coded them in  Workday using various features it provides.

It was terrific work and fantastic collaboration which has resulted in reliable ways for us to collectively look at, in real time, how a student is proceeding toward their major/minor requirements. Since this is critical to get it right, we have rolled it out just to seven departments for this graduating class and we are seeing tremendous efficiencies and positive feedback overall. Our plan is to roll this out in the Fall to all remaining majors and minors and open it up to students, faculty and other administrators who support students. I honestly think this will result in a lot of good outcomes including how the students plan their registrations better to graduate on time.

One important ask from to Workday always is that they should really look into using Natural Language Processing to translate requirements described in a catalog and automatically create the ruleset that can then be refined by the Registrar’s Office. The next step is simply look at the course descriiptions to match catalog descriptions to decide which requirements a student has met. (Dream on!)

Major/Minor Declaration, Approvals etc – As I mentioned before, our Workday Extend (a low code programming environment that Workday has provided) system manages major(s) and/or minor declaration by the students, and request a faculty member to advise them has been used hundreds of times since Oct 2021, with very little in the way of support tickets or questions. Faculty advisors also have been using them to approve, review academic plans. This, again, has been going smoothly.

Finally, in what I would consider a huge step for us, we have used the data from academic plans and academic progress reports from Workday to automatically identify graduating seniors who have completed their requirements (of course, Reg Office has validated all of these) and therefore no need for a department/program chair to review them gain, thereby reducing the number of plans or academic progress reports that they have to review! When they all have the least amount of time to do this on top of their regular work, I sure hope this will be received as welcome news.

Handling COVID Related Issues – We experienced several changes during the past couple of years because of COVID crisis that affected various administrative processes. We were able to respond fairly quickly and to several last minute changes. For example, the crisis began in March 2020 by which time we had already opened registration for summer and several students had already registered. An initial decision was made to keep the two summer sessions, but subsequently it was changed to a single session. Then we decided to move to having two 7 week terms in each semester for a whole year. These required significant changes to the configuration in Workday and downstream systems and we got them done in a significantly short time.

Miscellaneous – Because of definitional and process changes, we have MUCH better data today than before and we control access to data in a far more sophisticated way thanks to a fantastic security model in Workday (yes, it has its pain points!). We have several integrations that work great, again, thanks to the formal and state of the art nature of integration Workday supports. WSDL mechanisms, which are comprehensively documented, and so many multiple versions are supported, makes it easy for us to transition our integrations. As I mentioned, the financial aid office and student financials use the system to bill properly and collect money. 

Our class deans maintain advisor notes in Workday securely which was a FileMaker Pro app that was a dangerously outdated version until we cut it over. We use the Student Documents feature in Workday to bring in a lot of external documents including documents upon matriculation from Slate all the way to multiple documents of relevance created until their graduation. Centralizing documents this way and using the security model, we are also able to share these documents appropriately by reusing the security set up.

As I warned you before, I can go on and on. Bottom line, for us, Workday Student has pretty much everything we need to conduct business and has been a net positive. What’s next? This summer and fall we will be rolling out the equivalent of WANDA, our beloved home grown student data warehouse built on Microsoft  SQL Server, in Workday Prism. And that will be for another few posts, because the work that is happening in this area is simply awesome!

Finally, I am so thankful for my team from LTS and the Registrar’s Office for making all of these possible, with a lot of hard work, but also a lot of enthusiasm.