IRP Student - 2022 in review
IRP Student - 2022 in review
December 14, 2022As we move closer to the end of 2022, the Integrated Renewal Program – Student (IRP Student) would like to take a moment to reflect on all the achievements we have made and thank all our stakeholders for their continued support and contributions throughout the past year.
2022 marked a significant year for the program as we moved through the Design phase into the Build phase. In the Build phase design input gathered from the community will be incorporated into Workday Student, its integrations, and newly created point solutions.
The Mission to Launch campaign kicked off multiple, cross-campus activities, building awareness and generating interest in IRP Student’s progress toward delivering a renewed student information system. The campaign included a community-wide virtual town hall, introducing the Mission to Launch campaign video, and providing foundational knowledge through Workday Student 101 virtual sessions and web content.
An Institutional Readiness Assessment was conducted in late November to assess the UBC community's level of readiness for Workday Student and help inform the upcoming transition and support activities in 2023. A sampling of highly impacted users was invited to complete the survey, and an open link was shared for general participation. The results of this survey will provide a baseline measurement and additional assessments will be conducted throughout the new year to measure progress. Results of this assessment are being consolidated, and more information including next steps will be available in early 2023.
In 2023, the program will move from the Build phase into the anticipated Testing phase, which will entail testing the final system to ensure Workday Student and all applications function as expected to support UBC processes. During this stage, the project team will also finalize training materials and kick-off end-user training.
Below, some of the highlights of 2022 are featured.
Academic Requirements
Throughout 2022, academic requirements for majors, minors, and specializations were configured and validated to replace the current Degree Navigator reports when Workday Student is launched.
Sessional Evaluations
In 2022, all programs currently running sessional evaluations in SISC were consulted, and work started on setting up the agreed-upon rules to define a student’s Academic Standing in Workday Student.
In 2023, review of the configuration will begin to make sure the rules work as expected and result in correct academic standings for our students.
Year Level Promotion
In fall 2022, a new enhancement implemented by Workday allows for the setup of automatic year-level promotion based on Faculty-specific rules. This new (and exciting) functionality is currently being tested against UBC’s current practices and different scenarios of promoting students to their next year level. Once testing is done, the IRP Student team will engage to design these rules for each specific Faculty.
Pathway Declaration
Throughout 2022, substantial progress was made in setting up pathway declaration processes (in other words, declaring/changing/dropping majors/minors) for most programs across both campuses.
Graduation
The design of the processes to support student applications for graduation and advisor adjudication of these applications are nearing completion. In 2023, work will continue to finalize the design.
Learner Financial Management (LFM)
In the later part of 2022, the configuration for past-due account management, refund management, learner payment, T4A and T2202, and several other reports were completed. The team brought several changes to the Cross Platform Change Review Board including new student revenue worktags, new payment types, new journal sources, and more.
The initial configuration of Sponsorship functionalities was completed, and noteworthy progress was made on defining business processes after extensive collaborative consultation. Other items that have progressed in the past few months include: the charge assessment schedule, student financial statement, interest charges, fee rules maintenance, payments by journal vouchers, collections, and write-off processes. Student Direct Stream (SDS) has moved into the scope of the project and the initial design has been completed, leveraging the Business Process Management System (BPMS). Read more about point solutions here. The configuration of TouchNet is underway and more will be shared in 2023.
Learner Financial Support (LFS)
As part of the overall IRP Student program planning and ongoing analysis, IRP Student identified a need to rethink the implementation approach of the LFS solution, AwardCloud, to ensure business continuity at UBC throughout 2023 - 2024.
This resulted in the decision to implement a phased approach for AwardCloud. This means that instead of the capabilities being delivered entirely for Launch 1, they will be delivered over Launches 1 and 2 and beyond. Read more about the launch timeline here.
Launches 1 and 2 of AwardCloud will focus on modernizing functions supported in the current Student Information System (SIS) and provide the foundation to ensure business continuity at UBC and future continuous improvements. More specifically:
- Launch 1 (October 2023): focus will be on AwardCloud functionalities currently available in the SIS to prepare and setup 2024W awards that will allow for business continuity at UBC.
- Launch 2 (February 2024): focus will be on AwardCloud functionalities currently available in the SIS to support 2024W student loans and UBC Bursary processes that will allow for business continuity at UBC.
- After Launch 2 (March 2024 and beyond): focus will be on AwardCloud functionalities that will enhance business operations at UBC allowing for greater automation and efficiencies.
In the past months, the team has pivoted quickly to the phased approach. All design topics have been completed for Launch 1 and 2. The Build phase has started to reflect design in the AwardCloud environment and will continue into 2023.
Registration
A custom report, tailored to UBC’s needs for finding course sections for student registration, was developed. The Registration Appointment window for 2024W was reviewed while keeping in mind that 2024W registration will be new for staff and students alike. It was decided that undergraduate registration will include a triage week after Year 4 registration, making undergraduate registration 5 weeks long for 2024W.
In late 2022, the team pivoted to a different waitlist management approach that will provide an enhanced student experience for getting into desired course sections. A dedicated Registration tab was added to the Academics App to deliver to students a one-stop solution for items pertinent to registration.
A manual credit limit cohort-based model was prototyped, designed, and configured that will allow units to edit a student’s credit limits and overcome a functionality limitation. An approach was created for Reserve Capacity Rules will be setup for Launch 1, with endorsement to creating compound rules post Launch 1.
In Fall 2022, all Faculties were consulted to discuss the larger anticipated changes coming to registration once Workday Student launches. This provided the opportunity to address unit-specific concerns and questions.
Scheduling
Many reports were identified and created to ensure that departmental administrators have access to information required for their jobs. The integration between Workday Student and Scientia will continue into 2023 to ensure the systems are properly converting data for course section scheduling. A solution for accessing Scientia from within Workday Student was identified, and staff will be able to launch Scientia through a Worklet. A Worklet is a Workday term referring to a portal for a user to receive information and access tasks or actions.
Because Workday Student has limited exam management functionality, a tool is currently in development to ensure that administrators can log exam requirements, create exam schedules, process exam applications, and publish specific student exam schedules.
Current users of Standard Timetables (STT) at UBC Vancouver were consulted to discuss how STTs will look in Workday Student. While the functionality will not be identical, ways have been identified to get similar registration outcomes for the students. The Standard Timetable Manager Application is in development. UBC Okanagan does not use STTs and it was not within scope to consult outside of current users.
A decision was made to develop a website with course schedule information that would be available to the general public to access without a Campus Wide Login. The information is read only and any registration activities will occur in Workday Student.
Transfer Credit
Great strides were made in the bulk assignment of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) credit on a student’s academic record. AP and IB test scores were set up in Workday Student which will allow for the bulk assessment of transfer credit. This means users with the appropriate security roles can search for all AP or IB test scores received in Workday Student in a specific time period, and bulk evaluate them for transfer credit.
Admissions
Throughout 2022, development work has continued on the Admissions Administrative Portal (AAP), with some areas of focus including the search framework, readmissions evaluations, and transfer credit assignments. Work is also being done on various integrations including the integration with Perceptive Content (used in Undergraduate Admissions for document imaging and workflow management), and data mapping is underway for the Admissions solution (ADM) to Workday Student integration. The extraction of the Broad Based Admission Evaluation system (used in Personal Profile scoring and administration, and other admissions processes) is now complete. Access and security permissions within ADM is also being worked on.
Curriculum Management
The area of Curriculum Management continues to stay busy with creating new reports, moving forward with design and configuration, and reviewing prior configuration and design to ensure that it still works with all the cross-functional design happening.
During 2022, 10 operational reports were developed including a report that will use course tags to identify all special topics courses at UBC.
A large program of study validation was done with all the Faculties to ensure that certain information around programs of study will appear correctly in Workday Student. Program of study attributes were also aligned with Enterprise Data Governance (EDG) standards and program design was done to bring the programs into Workday Student.
The College of Graduate Studies and the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral studies were consulted to validate the mapping of graduate programs, their associated academic units, and security configurations.
Program versions from the current SIS were reviewed, case-by-case, to determine how to configure them in Workday Student; as a program of study, a cohort, or to replace the reason for the program version with other Workday Student functionality. A master list relating to programs and program versions was created to ease cross-functional collaboration.
A large amount of work was done to manually program credit exclusion statements that currently appear in course descriptions into Workday Student’s anti-requisite functionality. (Credit exclusion lists maintained by some Faculties and Schools were not programmed). The Senate team was supported with the Course Validation Project to prepare for changes to prerequisites, corequisites, and equivalencies.
Assessment Outcomes
One of the main highlights in Assessment Outcomes was the start of the Final Grade Submission point solution in November 2022. To prepare for the development, engagement sessions were held with instructors and others who enter final grades to gather feedback on the process to submit grades using the Faculty Service Center (FSC). The information gathered from those sessions will be used to help inform the design of the point solution.
In addition, new grade standings have been configured to prevent missing grades in Workday Student. For other processes to run properly (for example, sessional evaluations) there must be a grade or standing in the grade field, in other words, there cannot be blank grades. Standings such as NS (Not Submitted) and EXG (Externally Graded) will help to ensure that there is value in the grade field so that other processes can run.
Lastly, several processes were designed including a missing grade process and a process that will be used to bulk update grades such as Not Submitted, Thesis in Progress, and Externally Graded. Approval routing and notifications for initiators and approvers of the Grade Change Business Process were also configured.
Learner Management
Learner Management had a busy 2022 seeing lots of configuration of business processes (BP) within Workday Student. One example of this, in coordination with Workday, was that a decision was made to upgrade from using the Contact Change BP to the newer Home Contact Change and Work Contact Change BPs so that people who are both students and employees of UBC could update their contact information more seamlessly.
Additionally, student holds were streamlined. Holds were either removed due to disuse or combined in areas that needed simplification. Hold reasons and definitions are visible to students in Workday Student, and were updated for consistency and clarity.
Much work has been done with student personal information (PI) that has been advised upon and reviewed by our Equity & Inclusion Office (EIO), EDG, and various community stakeholders. Data values for gender identity, pronouns, and trans experience will meet the standards of EIO and EDG, and give students the ability to represent themselves in a more holistic manner than they currently can within the Student Service Centre (SSC). Additionally, students will be able to modify their gender identity, pronouns, trans experience, and preferred names themselves. The field containing a student’s legal name will require modification by an Enrolment Services user and can only be written in English and French characters, as recognized by the Canadian government.
Work is underway on our communication system. It was determined that Workday Student cannot replicate the Student Information Service Centre’s (SISC) functionality available for bulk ad-hoc communications. As such, IRP Student is building a complementary application that will allow users to compose and send an email to a targeted student population. These emails will then be stored to build a comprehensive “communication history” for the student that will be available for review by users with appropriate security roles.
Discovery work was also completed to understand how Workday Student can send users notifications as needed. By default, all notifications will either go to the Workday bell icon or task, but it was determined that it can also be sent in the form of an email as well. Notifications can include dynamic content specific to the user so that it is customized to the recipient.
2023 will be a big year for IRP Student. We look forward to sharing the results of the designs during the community Call-In Sessions, starting with the testing phase, commencing training activities, and of course, Launch 1 of Workday Student – Initiate.