Liz Dietz discusses the general availability of Workday Student, a system we've built hand-in-hand with our customer design partners to bring a truly modern student information system to market.
Today we announced the general availability of Workday Student, marking an incredibly rewarding moment for us at Workday and the customer design partners who have worked so closely with us to bring a modern student information system to market.
When we set out to build Workday Student together, it was with the keen understanding that administrators, faculty, and students needed a system that was as intuitive and easy-to-use as the other technologies they use in their daily lives.
Our design partners were critical to making this happen.They told us thatcurrent student systems are disjointed, outdated, and don’t reflect the way they work today. Many important functions that are a part of modern higher education institutions simply weren’t around 20 to 30 years ago when existing systems were built.
For example, with those legacy systems, finance doesn’t have a single source of truth to plan for and forecast student tuition revenue, making it very difficult to make accurate revenue projections. Administrators don’t have the tools to predict course demand based on what courses students actually need over time to meet their graduation requirements. And today’s students, used to getting everything they need with a tap on a screen and completing their homework online, are frustrated by complicated and tedious student management systems.
The past few years of building Workday Student have been interesting, enlightening, invigorating, sometimes challenging, and most of all, rewarding.
So what makes Workday Student different? Traditional manual processes are replaced by an embedded business process framework that automates workflow. An in-memory object model ensures that all data across the entire student and faculty landscape is in one place, allowing administrators to make smarter decisions right within Workday without having to export spreadsheets and cross-reference information. Mobile functionality lets students register for classes or seek advising help on whatever device they use, whenever and wherever they want to do it. Most of all, though, the visibility gained by having everything in one place allows the emphasis to be put back where it needs to be – on student learning.
The past few years of building Workday Student have been interesting, enlightening, invigorating, sometimes challenging, and most of all, rewarding. I know it has for our design partners, too, and we couldn’t have done it without them. Thanks again to them for joining us on this incredible journey to a modern student system. I’ll leave you with some things they’ve told us about their experience over the past few years as design partners and early adopters of Workday Student.
“Right now, our faculty uses manual processes for everything because they can’t get what they need from our current system. Students have a system that is very clunky and old as well. It’s exciting to be working with Workday in order to develop a system that’s intuitive. We can give our students and faculty something fresh—something they can access on their phone. Better yet, we will actually be able to get their attention! No one wants to wait for a letter that comes in the mail two weeks later.”
“Current systems are like a filing cabinet where you put data in but can’t easily use it in meaningful ways. Workday Student will be entirely different, combining in-memory technology, built-in analytics, a cloud delivery model, and a mobile-first design approach, to allow us to access, manage, and understand data in ways that weren’t previously possible. As an early adopter, we have the unique opportunity to influence the technology that will impact our college directly and ultimately enable our entire organization to serve students, faculty, and staff in new and very powerful ways.”
“The most important part of Workday Student is the fact that it’s designed from the ground up. It’s not layered on years and generations of older technology. It starts with a completely clean slate and is designed based on best practices. You can’t do better than that. And now that Workday Student is generally available, we are excited about beginning the implementation at Steven’s Institute of Technology.”
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