Curriculum & Registration

Curriculum management, or course management, involves the creation and maintenance of courses and course sections. Registration involves the management of registration appointments and enrollment policies, including course repeat policies, waitlists and overrides.

Key terms: In Workday, a course section is the specific instance of a course for which a student registers during a given academic period. It has a meeting pattern, instructional format, instructor, etc. Course sections are “children” of courses, which contain core information like course title, course number, description, and pre- or co-requisites.

WashU will use Workday Student for the following curriculum and registration-related activities and policies:

Course and course section creation and maintenance, including components like course tags (attributes), subjects, meeting patterns, pre- and co-requisites
Instructor assignments, including instructor eligibility and managing instructor load
Registration management, including appointments, waitlists, overrides, drops and reserving seats
Enrollment policies, including which courses a student can register for and the maximum number of units in which a student can enroll
Student registration and pre-registration planning, supported by advising
Course attempt and repeat (retake) policies
Grading, including entering and viewing final grades, and how students can be graded
Updating the Bulletin

Key changes

Reduced manual effort during registration

School registrars, and to varying degrees departmental administrators, spend significant time reviewing and manipulating waitlists and rosters to enforce prerequisites and prioritize enrollment for specific populations of students. The following changes in Workday Student should reduce manual effort for these tasks.

Pre- and co-requisites will be configured in Workday Student and visible when browsing courses. Students who do not meet the defined requirements will be unable to register. This change will benefit students by equitably enforcing requirements and allowing them to see what they’re eligible for ahead of registration, so they can plan accordingly.

Seats can be reserved for specific populations of students within course sections, and automatically released at a designated point in time. For example, seats can be reserved for students in a particular program of study, school or year, e.g., seniors.

Student view of a course section. Prerequisites are listed under Eligibility and reserved seats are shown under Available Reserved Seats. Source: Workday Student demo environment. Click to enlarge.

Improved planning and roster stability

Instructors, registrars and administrators experience notable instability of class rosters during the first 10 days of class prior to the “add/drop” deadline. This instability is exacerbated by WebSTAC functionality that allows students to register for concurrent course sections. Realistically, students can only be in one class at a time (unless they have a Time Turner a la Hermione Granger), so they eventually need to drop one, or more, classes.

In Workday, a student cannot register for two course sections that occur at the same time. However, they can use Workday’s academic planning functionality and their saved schedule to prepare for registration. Students also will be able to see which courses they are eligible for ahead of registration and plan accordingly, which should reduce the need to register for concurrent courses to safeguard against ineligibility.

Course organization and maintenance

WashU will be adopting a universal four-digit course numbering system to indicate course rigor and level. Currently, courses are a mix of three and four digits, and numbering is not always consistent within and across departments or schools. This change should make it easier for students to see the progression of courses available within a program.

Effective dating will allow WashU to create new versions of a course for minor changes, e.g., units or grading basis, rather than creating an entirely new course and course number. This change will address the current need to create new courses and numbers for such changes, which has led to some departments “running out” of numbers.

Systems

SIS web applications WebFAC, used by faculty for entering and approving final grades, and WebSTAC, used by students for registering for courses, will be replaced by Workday Student. Workday will connect with other systems to exchange data related to rosters, classroom assignments, course materials, instructor evaluations and updating the Bulletin.

Reporting

In general, users will be able to view and report on the same types of data in Workday as they do in our current systems for curriculum and registration. The primary difference in Workday will be the consolidation of data in one system, which should reduce the need to combine data from multiple systems using external tools like Excel, Access or other databases. The move to a single student administrative system also should eliminate certain audit reports currently used to ensure that data “matches” in multiple systems, i.e., SIS and WUCRSL.

Contacts

Questions?

Please contact Sean McWilliams (change manager for Advising, Degree Audit & Curriculum) or Joe Rehder (change manager for Records and Registration), who serve as liaisons between the WashU community and the project.

Alternatively, you can submit questions or comments through this form.

Project team members

Stephanie Brelsford, Curriculum functional lead
Melody Cox, Curriculum support business analyst
Sean McWilliams, Advising, Degree Audit & Curriculum change manager
Allison Braun, Advising, Degree Audit & Curriculum communications specialist
Tiffany Saffell, Advising, Degree Audit & Curriculum instructional designer
Marissa Kaltwasser, Records and Registration functional lead
Eddie Anderson, Records and Registration principal business analyst
Kelly Johnson, Records and Registration support business analyst
Joe Rehder, Records and Registration change manager
Amy Whittier, Records and Registration communications specialist
Amanda Ringwald, Records and Registration instructional designer
Daria Carson-Dussán, technical writer

Campus team members

View the Sunrise campus teams roster to see who’s on the Curriculum & Registration campus team from your school or unit. Campus team members provide input on how Workday Student is configured and insight into how changes will affect their area.

Learn more about Sunrise campus teams