The next topic that I would like to discuss is Academic Record. A robust academic record is essential for a good student information system (SIS). This is where we maintain all the information related to the student all through their time at the College. The definition of “Education Record” from Department of Education is a good starting point to understanding what an academic record is.

These records include but are not limited to grades, transcripts, class lists, student course schedules, health records (at the K-12 level), student financial information (at the postsecondary level), and student discipline files.

“These records include but are not limited to” makes it subjective and depending on the institution, different information is included. For this reason, the SIS needs to be versatile in allowing the institution the flexibility to record additional information.

Multiple Academic Records

Wellesley has had a need to maintain multiple academic records for students. We have students who graduate and enroll in a post baccalaureate program; until a few years ago we had a summer program that supported different pre-college programs who took courses and received grades that needed to be transcripted; Many of the pre-college students successfully enrolled as a regular undergraduate students at the College.

Workday allows the creation of multiple academic records for the same person and allows us to maintain different information on these different academic records. The matching algorithm to determine if the student already has an academic record is continually improving. When you produce transcripts, there is clear delineation of information about each of the programs of study for the different academic record.

If a student is matriculating after we move to Workday but has a prior association with the College and we did not bring in their information, this poses a challenge that requires a workaround. I will discuss this issue of historical student information in a later post.

Core Information

Workday provides a lot of ways to record and track student information through various core business objects. Whether it is the demographic information, classes one is enrolled in, waitlisted, dropped, the grades they received, term GPA, overall GPA, their programs of study (majors/minors), academic progress, student financials, financial aid information, academic honors and awards etc. there are places to configure, use and report on them. You also can maintain housing information and student accomplishments. Honors and awards have this nuance that they can only be entered for those students who have completed their programs of study, but this is not the case for student accomplishments.

Workday allows you to label and configure personal information such as gender, gender identity and personal pronouns, which are very important for our students. In addition, administrators can configure a fairly large number of address types such as permanent home address, address while in the USA for international students who may have friends and relatives with whom they stay, College address etc.

A student can also choose a preferred first and last name. We have configured Workday tenants to show preferred names everywhere in Workday as well as downstream applications. Since preferred name defaults to first name, there is no need for any additional logic here. Of course, the legal name appears in all relevant documents such as transcripts and tax documents.

I will not go into details here, but Workday also offers certain attributes called “period records”. The one that we use the most is Financial Aid Period Record (FAPR) where we track the status of students as it pertains to the calculation of financial aid as well as student billing.

Transfer credits and their maintenance is available and again an area where careful thought needs to go into properly configuring it based on your workflow. At Wellesley, students need to apply and seek permission for taking classes elsewhere and counting them towards any of their requirements, be it general or major/minor requirements. This application process currently lives outside workday, but by this fall, we expect this to move to Workday Extend. Workday allows you to maintain the External Institution catalog and allows you to configure various rules such as mapping the course information from the external institution to the equivalent course at our institution and the conversion rules for credit.

My assumption is that soon, we will be able to upload an image of the transfer credit document from the external institution and using AI, Workday will be able to parse it and populate the information for review by the Registrar’s Office.

As rich as this set of constructs are, they require a lot of thought that needs to go in configuring them properly and using them. There are a few areas where things are irreversible. This is a characteristic of Workday in that it never forgets certain things. For example, there was an error in matriculating a class that we needed to reverse and we could not. Instead, we changed their IDs to a non standard ID and made sure that they are excluded from all of our reporting. Certain items are reversible, but it requires clearing all assigned values first.

We spent a considerable amount of time configuring everything carefully for academic integrity. Like always, it is the outliers that always take up the most time. For example, our rules about grades in courses that are repeated. Workday’s delivered functionality did not have exactly what we needed, but we were able to find creative ways to accomplish them.

Academic Progress Report is another area that requires considerable work. This is essentially the degree audit. Because of the complexity of rules for general requirements as well as requirements for majors and minors, we spent a lot of time. This is for another post.

Extended Information

With all the rich set of business objects  to track a lot of student information, each institution will likely have the need to track additional information. Workday provides a way to do this through custom objects. Whereas custom objects are rich in functionality, including providing a way to do effective dating, the number of custom objects available is limited and one needs to be careful in how best to use them.

We have custom objects to track various things for ease of use. Semester Counter is one of them, which basically tracks which semester of their time at the College a student is in. It is straightforward (between 1 and 8) for most students who are progressing well and will likely complete in 4 years, but varies for those who have taken a leave of absence. This is then used for various business purposes. These objects can be dynamically manipulated based on other values in the student record or manipulated using integrations.

We also use an attribute called “Other IDs” as a way to store additional information. What we store may be questionable as an “ID”, but that doesn’t stop us from using it that way. For example, we provide the combination for their mailboxes through an ID, we provide the commencement ceremony seating information as an ID etc.

Security

Though I will write a separate post about Security, I just want to mention that almost everything here is immensely configurable with Workday’s fantastic security model. Data is grouped into different domains and domain security can be controlled using security groups, depending on the domain. Security Groups is a very rich construct and explaining it is beyond the scope of this. But, we have been able to use this in very interesting ways. Their Segmented security groups allow further access control.

There are some limitations with the security model though. There are tasks and reporting elements that are grouped together and are secured based on a domain security policy. Sometimes, this is inconvenient because you want to secure only a subset of items in that domain and you cannot do it. You need to find workarounds.

For example, we have had the practice that if students do not complete the course evaluations by the deadline, we do not show the final grades for that semester for some number of days, but they can still order official transcripts. This is not possible to configure using security because of the different areas where grades are shown in Workday, as a result, we needed to hide a lot more information than the grades through the security.

No worries, we created a workaround for those who did not complete the evaluation so they can still see “other non-grade related” information.