In an email sent to the student body on September 24, 2020, Provost Christophe Pierre announced that Stevens Institute of Technology is “making strong progress” toward the launch of Workday Student. Provost Pierre, whose five-year term as Provost is ending after this academic year, identified March 2021 as the target launch date for Workday Student.
The announcement was received with mild fanfare from both students and administrators. Workday Student will replace the current student information system, SunGard Tsrvweb, which is commonly referred to as “Web Self Services.” This is the system currently used for students to register for classes, access their transcript, see their grades and course schedules, and view financial aid information, among other features.
The replacement of Tsrvweb has been anticipated for quite some time. Stevens is one of only two universities, alongside Louisiana Tech University, that still actively use it. Common criticism of Sungard’s software includes general slowness, poor compatibility with mobile browsers, and inability to handle the scale of Stevens’ student body. Tsrvweb’s inadequacy in handling course registration for the student body is well documented โ it was the subject of a November 2017 poem published by The Stute. Tsrvweb also has profound security defects. It is an open secret among the more tech-savvy factions of Stevens’ community that many students attempt to circumvent Tsrvweb’s deficiencies when registering for courses by exploiting these security defects to build “bots” which register for them โ one student even referred to registration as a “contest” to see who can build the best bot. Tsrvweb is also very old. The landing page for accessing it through MyStevens claims it “is a known issue that Safari 6.0 on Mac OS X Lion is incompatible with Student/Faculty Web Self Services.” Mac OS X Lion was released in 2011, nine years ago, and discontinued just over a year later.
In other words, the replacement of Tsrvweb with a more modern and robust service like Workday Student should solve a lot of problems that students and faculty regularly face at the current time. Provost Pierre wrote that “Workday is a major step forward that will simplify the lives of our students, faculty and staff. Its introduction represents an important milestone toward our goal to make Stevens more student-centric.”
Students who have been employed in on-campus jobs will already be familiar with Workday’s interface; Stevens adopted Workday’s payroll management software as its employment portal in April 2015. Workday is also currently used by Stevens employees as it allows them to submit hours worked, set up payment information, and view their payslips. Workday Student is a separate software system; Workday describes it as an “end-to-end student and faculty lifecycle information system” designed to work seamlessly with Workday’s other products. Students will be able to access their records, view course offerings, register for courses, manage their academic financials, view their academic status, and perform most other actions currently serviced by Tsrvweb. Workday Student also has a mobile interface.
Stevens’ plans to adopt Workday Student have been in place for some time, and the history of those plans occasionally took dramatic turns. Dr. David Dodd, who served as Stevens’ chief information officer until his recent retirement, announced that Stevens was “about to make” the transition to Workday Student nearly three years ago. The ransomware attack which crippled Stevens’ information infrastructure in August 2019 and the 2020 coronavirus pandemic both had profound impacts on Stevens’ development plans for Workday Student. Provost Pierre assured the Stevens community that these problems have been overcome, writing that “members of the Workday project team have continued to work diligently toward implementing Workday Student and managing the transition.”
Currently, this transition plan stipulates that registration for Fall 2021 semester courses (which occurs during the Spring 2021 semester) will be done through Workday Student. Further announcements regarding the rollout plan for Workday Student are planned for the coming months, and a “virtual mock semester” will be held in November to test the system.
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