As part of the Student Sunrise project, the team is gathering and verifying all of WashU’s existing program of study and course requirement data. They are then entering these requirements in Workday Student, where the requirements will be maintained going forward once the system launches during 2024-25 academic year.
To accomplish this, the project team is collaborating with Sunrise campus team members, primarily from the Advising, Degree Audit & Curriculum team, as well as directors of undergraduate and graduate studies in Arts & Sciences.
Program requirements documented
Program requirements include anything a student must do to complete their program of study, e.g., completing certain courses or a total number of credit hours, maintaining a GPA, etc. In Workday, program requirements are referred to as academic requirements.
At this point in the project, most schools have been engaged in the initial review of their academic requirements, with additional schools being included later this year or in 2023.
Academic requirements have been gathered and documented from the Bulletin, program websites, and any supplemental information provided by schools during the outreach.
Course requirements under review
As of summer 2022, schools have assessed course requisites pulled from WUCRSL to determine whether those should be configured in Workday Student or not.
That was an important decision point since our current system doesn’t enforce pre- or co-requisites. A course description might mention a requirement; however, it’s up to registrars and other administrators to manually review students’ eligibility.
By contrast, anything configured as a pre- or co-requisite in Workday Student will be automatically enforced by the system. That means only students with the designated requisites will be able register for a course.
This change should benefit students by equitably enforcing requirements and allowing them to see what courses they’re eligible for ahead of registration so they can plan accordingly. The change will also reduce manual effort by registrars and other administrators.
“There’s a lot of excitement for reduced administrative burden,” said Cris Baldwin, associate university registrar. “When I was at Sam Fox [School of Visual Arts & Design], I spent lots of time manually processing waitlists to ensure students were in the courses they needed to sequence through degree requirements. Automated processes that check for pre- and co-requisites will be a welcome time saver.”
Next up
The project team knows that curricula and programs change, and therefore we need to develop a process to manage updates between now and go-live. But first, they need to complete the initial setup of course and program requirements for approximately 25,000 courses (those that have pre- or co-requisites) and 1,100 programs, at last count. While the workload is significant, so are the future benefits for students and those who support them.
“Configuring requirements in Workday is complicated and not always straightforward, but the end product is going to be so worth it!” said business analyst Tina Kennett, who is configuring academic requirements. “When we can make things easier for the students, that’s a win.”
“When we can make things easier for the students, that’s a win.”
Tina Kennett, Student Sunrise business analyst for advising