On the morning of April 7, students woke up to a slew of emails instructing them to update their personal information on the newly convocated Workday.
Workday Student, a platform that the College began working on two years ago, is a cloud-based software system designed to improve access to information and communication for students, faculty, and staff alike. By the time everything is set up, Workday will replace myColby, officially retiring the 1986 software.
Some of the functions already on Workday include the ability to view your grades, compile your tax forms, complete pre-set tasks assigned in your inbox, and look up the course catalog for next year. Many of the functions advertised by our class deans are still missing, such as the ability to request transcripts and look up our finances, and they still have to be completed on myColby. It appears that these missing features will be introduced in the coming weeks and months as the need arises. During that time, students will be switching back and forth between the two as confusion abounds over what tasks belong with which software. It promises to be a turbulent time characteristic of all technological advances, where old and inefficient tools are begrudgingly cast off in favor of less likeable but more streamlined new ones. It was the case with crude bronze spears to polished iron swords, horse stables to car garages, Nokia keyboards to iPhone touchscreens, and now, from myColby to Workday.
Less about hyperbolic epochs though, and more about the present.
As of now, the question on the minds of all students as they begin setting up their profile and exploring the tabs is the issue of course registration. To this end, Workday has many functions which make the process markedly easier than it was on myColby.
The first and most important of these is live registration. Back in the olden days, students were required to register for courses beforehand, and they would learn whether they got those courses or not at a later date. This system brought with it many headaches, which included the anxiety of waiting to see what classes and professors you’ll get instead of knowing immediately, frantically switching courses to beat out the competition once schedules are released, and being forced to settle with compromises. From personal experience, the old registration system has caused me to miss out on core requirements and denied me professors I really wanted to have. Though live registration isn’t guaranteed to reverse every woe listed above, it does promise to significantly alleviate them by returning agency back to the students.
Basically, how it works is that on the date that a student registers for classes, all they have to do is search for the course and professor they want, and if they meet the eligibility requirements and there is space, they are officially enrolled. No more anxiously waiting for official schedules to release; now, students get to know their schedules on the spot. Furthermore, they will be much more likely to land what they want, and if not, they can automatically enroll in their second or third choices instead. Students are now taking advantage of their new freedoms, exploring course catalogs and meeting with advisors to hash out their schedules and develop contingency plans.
This brings me to the second major benefit of Workday: the schedules. Students can add courses they’re interested in to a schedule that they then consult come registration day. Multiple schedules can be created at once, allowing students to organize different combinations of courses with different times and instructors, weighing which ones they like the most. Schedules allow students to pre-plan and to sort out their personal and academic priorities, all the while allowing students something to reference when it finally comes time to enroll in courses. This is a major step up from myColby, where students only had one schedule to work with, meaning that any choice they made to drop or add a course technically only applied to their “official” schedule. Furthermore, it became a hassle to have to switch between tabs or take a picture of your schedule to make sure anything you enrolled in wasn’t hit with a time conflict error message. For students like me who love organization and efficiency, schedules stand to be a huge plus.
Speaking of efficiency, one last side note I’d like to talk about is the waitlist. Back then, students wishing to join the waitlist had to contact the professor directly. This can spell trouble if the professor doesn’t respond to emails, which necessitates an in-person meeting. In Workday, you can join a waitlist automatically and be notified when a spot opens up.
For all the praises I’ve heaped upon Workday about how efficient and empowering it is, I do have some issues with it. Something I do like about myColby is how it encompasses so much—seriously, there are tabs and catalogs for anything you can think of. In comparison, Workday’s user interface just feels bare. It’s a whole bunch of white space with not many buttons to click. Moreover, the minimalist interface makes the pages feel impersonal and soulless. In myColby, the picturesque banner paired with a blueish theme and walls of text gives the page a sense of identity. The incorporation of myColby functions and some customization features are promising, but these are tests of the future. For now, the reality of a work in progress interface hits you in the face with its uninspiring doom and gloom.
Nonetheless, regardless of how mundane new technologies may look, their true value lies in their ability to make our lives today easier than it was yesterday. They laughed at how tiny Steve Job’s iPhone was, the same device in the pockets of billions of people today. Though I critique, let this in no way suggest I stand on the wrong side of history. Welcome to the new epoch—for course registration, at least.
~ Jonathan Zhang `28
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