Workday Student 101

With Workday, much of the data needed to support day-to-day student and academic operations will be accessible in one system. Workday also gives us multiple ways to view and access that data, including reports that come built with the system.

Prior to Workday, staff, faculty and students existed in multiple systems (i.e., HRMS, SIS, etc.), and different data was attributed to the person’s record depending on which “hat” they were wearing. In Workday, however, a person who wears multiple hats (e.g., student, staff, student worker) at WashU will have one profile and a single, unified set of personal data.

Academic units are the primary organizational structure in Workday Student. They are used to represent schools, divisions or any other unit that admits students, offers programs of study or offers courses. Academic units are structured together to manage academic process flows, security access, Workday rule inheritance and reporting.

Within Workday Student, programs of study are used to organize academic functions (such as courses requirements), people (such as faculty or students) and/or credentials (such as a degree or certificate). Today’s major program (MP) in SIS is the analogue to a program of study in Workday.

In Workday, faculty, staff, academic affiliates and students are eligible to teach classes. Academic appointments are the connecting point to allow those individuals to be linked to a course section and anything related to that course. 

Academic calendars define the academic periods (semester, summer, etc.) with start and end dates that make up the WashU academic year. Academic calendars are assigned to academic units or programs of study to manage related activities, like timing of course offerings, grading and student registration.

An academic record is a collection of a student’s academic information, such as their GPA, course registrations and academic history. In Workday, a student can have a single or multiple academic records, and each record can include one or multiple programs of study.

Security drives what you can see (student records, student notes, etc.) and do (create a course, review a student bill, etc.) in Workday. It also drives business processes, defining who reviews and approves each task.

In Workday, a business process, or “BP,” is an automated workflow that routes tasks to designated users. Common tasks include to-dos, reviews and approvals. Notifications can also be set up to notify a user that a step has begun or was completed, or a particular review response was selected. 

A “policy” can refer to a university policy or a Workday policy, the latter of which is a rule set configured in the system. Policies in Workday are “passed down” from superior academic units and “inherited” by their subordinate academic units.

An effective date in Workday is the date when a version of something goes into effect, such as a course title or pre-requisite requirement. Based on the action being completed, this may be a past, present or future date. Effective dating is beneficial to edit data in Workday without losing prior history, schedule changes to go into effect at a future date, or report on how something was configured at a certain point in time.

Workday is a cloud-based system, meaning it’s hosted on Workday’s servers and accessed over the internet via web browser or application. Because Workday Student is cloud-based, WashU will be on Workday’s regular release cycle for updates and improvements to functionality and data protection.