I know it has been a while since I wrote. I had a conference trip in early June and then a lot happened that kept me busy. Primarily we have been operating without one of our most productive colleagues since March and I have been pitching in and it has been taking a good chunk of my time. On to business here.

One of the most difficult, yet important things that we expect a good Student Information System to have is measuring if a student is progressing well towards their graduation. Different institutions do this differently. Some have fixed paths that begin upon matriculation where a student, with help from an advisor, sets up an academic plan and their progress is measured against this. At the other extreme is an open curriculum with no core requirements where the advisor and the student shape their academic journey through explorations. Most are somewhere in between. Small liberal arts colleges tend to have academic requirements closer to the open curriculum end than the more prescriptive plans and requirements.

Now the challenge is how can one system support all of these requirements. Unfortunately not and this is where most institutions have some form of customizations. Early ERPs did not have a way to support this and subsequently add ons were provided or software vendors who specialize in this offered solutions. Workday made this a priority for their student system and provided a framework that is pretty rich in its ability to support a wide range of requirements. Workday Student also has a robust Academic Planning module for students.

Couple of important things to remember – one is, an academic planning tool spanning multiple years in the future requires the institution to publish an accurate catalog of courses several years into the future; secondly, the system that is used to evaluate progress needs to be cognizant of multiple versions of the requirements; thirdly, depending on the institution’s policy, the system used to evaluate progress must either measure progress based on the academic requirements in effect at the time of the student’s matriculation or at the time they declare their program of study. Academic Plan or Academic requirements are sort of a contract with the student when they matriculate. If requirements change midstream, you cannot hold them to the new requirements. Maintaining a catalog of courses for future years is an institutional responsibility, but the system should accommodate it and similarly, whereas requirements may change from one academic year to next (mostly less often), the system should have the capability to associate the correct requirements with the correct students.

Workday has done their planning tool and Academic Progress Report, which matches what the student has already completed or currently registered in, with the associated academic requirements and provides a real time picture of how they are progressing. The information that is provided is very detailed and useful for the students and advisors. However, the usefulness of this is fully dependent on how well the institution has coded the academic requirements, a non trivial task.

I will not go into too many details, but the various constructs that Workday provides to construct the academic requirements are pretty sophisticated. It takes a while to understand all different possibilities to be able to fully utilize them, but once you get it, one realizes its power. As an early adopter, it took us a while and as we were configuring ours, Workday was making enhancements. Our general requirements have been almost fully configured in Workday and we evaluate them daily. There are a couple that are extremely hard to evaluate, so we have coded them in Prism and use the results to override the requirement’s status through webservices that Workday provides.

Requirements for about 35 or so Majors and Minors have also been configured and most of them are being actively used. Some of the others are for interdisciplinary majors and minors and are too complicated and because the number of students who major and minor in these programs are relatively small, we have not gotten to them yet.

Whereas Workday’s Planning and Academic Progress Report (APR) are rich, unfortunately the way they work or the way Workday presents the information does not suit our expectations and culture. This is one where we did not want to force the technology on our faculty and students.

Instead we took a creative approach by using Workday Extend to code the portions to fit our needs, but take advantage of the powerful academic progress report evaluation by Workday. In short, the process by which our students declare major(s) and or minor is something unique and we are entering 5th year of our Extend application for this and it is one of the most successful ones. In the same app, we ask the students to propose an academic plan consistent with the type of institution we are and given the constraint that our process currently creates a catalog only for a year at a time.

But, we use the academic progress report evaluation by Workday, but present it exactly the way we want it! For example, Workday presents the APR that includes ALL requirements in one report. Yes, you can sort and reorder them, but that is not what we need at the College. We have organized the general requirements in a particular way that nicely reveals where a student is in terms of progress. And it is separate from the Major and Minor requirements. In addition, the Major and Minor requirements are separated out. If a faculty advisor for a major wants to review the students progress, whereas they have access to everything, their primary focus is on the major for which they are the advisor. Our presentation makes this possible.

We have also been creative in more ways. For graduating seniors, we highlight unsatisfied requirements in bold red starting from the fall of their senior year so that they can plan properly to satisfy those requirements.

I think I have given you a flavor of yet another important aspect of the Student Information System that Workday provides that we feel has helped us tremendously.

For Workday folks: We really need a way to feed an AI system the narrative description of academic requirements that you find in catalog from most of our type of institution and create the academic requirements automatically! It can be a good start that we can then modify, but this will be a tremendous time saver.

And whereas this will not be relevant to liberal arts colleges, I am sure that there are other institutions where AI can provide some guidance on an academic plan based on historical data. I hate it when people make a comparison of this type of thing to Netflix movie recommendations! I am referring to a conversational approach where a student may be presented with a plan, but the student and advisor can converse with the system to refine a plan (or modify it when circumstances change).

I have more, but I will stop!

I would like to thank Carol Shanmugaratnam, the Registrar and my LTS colleagues Sharon Lecuyer, Mary Sprague and Nephellie Dobie for reviewing this.