Workday Student Will Help Students, Faculty, and Staff

From assisting with course scheduling to supporting registration, Workday Student is a valuable tool  

Workday Student, one of three key products of WPI’s Workday computer system, will soon be rolled out to the WPI community. It involves activities associated with the offices of the Registrar, Academic Affairs, Financial Aid, Bursar, Admissions, and more.

WPI Student follows earlier rollouts of Workday for Human Resources and Finance, is currently used for functions such as hiring, benefits, payroll, procurement, budgeting, and grants management.

We recently caught up with Veronica Brandstrader, change management and training manager for IT, to learn more about Workday Student, examples of how it would be used, and its many benefits to students, faculty, and staff.

Q: What is Workday Student and why is it important?

A: It is not easy to move away from Banner (WPI’s information system), which has been in use for 30 years, and has been heavily modified to work for WPI. Workday Student was created by a co-founder of PeopleSoft, who took a fresh approach to how information systems could take advantage of recent technology. Workday Student is a relatively young tool that will continue to evolve. Also, Workday is committed to harnessing emerging developments in areas like machine learning and AI to improve its products. Workday Student is very important because it’s the tool that will be used for academic records, registration, and grading.

Q: It’s called Student, so is it just for WPI students?

A: Students, faculty, and staff will use Workday instead of Banner for tasks related to academic and student records. For any tasks that cannot currently be accommodated by Workday, there is also an effort underway to ensure those forms are electronic, centralized, and easy to find.

Q: Can you offer a few examples of how someone would use it?

A: Students will assemble schedules (College Scheduler will still be available through Workday) and register for Fall 2021 classes in April 2021. Faculty and academic advisors can view student records and easily see open courses to support advising. Faculty will view course rosters in Workday, and submit final grades, which students will then see in Workday.

Q: Mock registration ends Friday, Nov. 6. Can members of the WPI community still sign up after that date?

A: Yes! We welcome involvement at any time. Mock registration is followed by User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and training, and participants are important not only for feedback, but because they can help spread the word within the WPI community. Our goal is to ensure everyone knows how to do what they need to do, and support is available when they need to do it.

Q: Please finish this sentence: Workday Student will enable you to…

• Use a mobile device to interact with academic records
• Accept or drop waitlist openings
• Use faceted searches to refine results
• Navigate seamlessly from high-level to detailed information
• Sort, filter, and hide or display columns in report tables
• Access data for predictive analysis
• Enjoy processes with a clean, modern interface