Last Updated: 04/25/2024
Check back here to see what the Student Data Program team is working on and their progress.
Census Data Operational Reporting Project
Description: This project’s focus is capturing student enrollment and demographics data in a snapshot format (4th and 10th week of a semester) to support university operational, accreditation, and compliance reporting. Workday Student does not have the capability to take point-in-time snapshots, so by housing this data in the WashU Data Warehouse, the university will have for the first time a central location where colleagues can access this data.
Progress: Requirements were collected based on meetings with the Office of the University Registrar, McKelvey, Arts & Sciences, Olin, Brown School, Sam Fox, CAPS, Law and WUSM. This resulted in identifying 100+ fields that will have a snapshot taken from Workday Student, along with what security access will look like for this data. The team recently hosted two office hours events with key stakeholders (April 11th and 16th) where we demonstrated a prototype with the purpose of collecting feedback. We are in the process of putting the finishing touches on the final architecture and look forward to beginning development next month.
Student Model (Workday/SIS) Project – Phase 1
Description: As one of the key focal points of the Student Data Program, the Student Data Project is aimed at bringing Workday Student and SIS historical data into the WashU Data Warehouse. Phase 1 focuses on building out the foundational components of Workday Student with scope limited to Course and Course Section Configuration, Academic Calendar, Academic Units, Academic Levels, Instructional Locations and Programs of Study profiles. This phase does not include student record data (i.e. no students will be included in this phase, because student record data will not be live in Workday until February 2025).
Progress: We are currently gathering requirements for Phase 1 which includes identifying fields, designing security, and collecting use cases. In addition, we recently established an Advisory group for this project. Participants include representation from all schools, Student Sunrise and OUR. The group’s initial focus is providing feedback on the planned phases (5 of them), priority and timeline. In the absence of stakeholders that we interview for requirements, this group will help ensure that the project direction meets the school’s needs.
Cloud SIS Reporting Database Project – Phase 1
Description: This project involves making a duplicate version of the SIS Reporting Database available in the cloud, loaded daily. Leading up to Workday Student being fully live in September 2025, users will be set up with access and can begin using the cloud version. Once Workday Student is live and SIS is retired (including the current SIS Reporting Database), the cloud version will become static but will continue to be available to support historical reporting needs.
Progress: As development activities continue and we near completion of automating the nightly refresh of the SIS Reporting Database in the cloud, we are working through how security will be applied to this data. Access in the cloud will be slightly different with some data elements, like gender and race, being more restricted than what you may currently have access to in SIS.
Slate Undergraduate Admissions Project
Description: This project focuses on moving the existing Slate Undergraduate Admissions Data Warehouse model from an on-premises SQL server to our new cloud-based Azure Data Warehouse. In doing so, we are updating the architecture, replacing data acquisition with API calls and incorporating required Spring Enhancements. This project is being coordinated with the Undergraduate Admissions Office.
Progress: We are nearing the end of our development activities. We have rebuilt all the tables in Azure, copied history to the cloud from the on-premises server, re-engineered our old SSIS ETL into Azure Data Factory ETL and developed new processes to pull data via API’s directly from the Slate Undergraduate system. The team is currently unit testing this code and making updates as needed. As we look towards May, Quality Assurance testing will begin.
Slate Graduate Admissions Project
Description: This project centers around bringing Slate Graduate data into the WashU Data Warehouse. In 2023, most of the university’s PhD, master’s and professional programs migrated to Slate (the MD program and School of Continuing & Professional Studies were not in scope). One of the main goals is to provide reporting capabilities around historical graduate applications and to make reporting easier across multiple admissions systems.
Progress: This project is in the very infancy of gathering requirements. We have had a kick-off meeting with the Slate Graduate Project Team and collected some high-level requirements, such as the need to capture history from the Slate Graduate system before it is purged to support historical reporting. As we move forward, we will begin to identify stakeholders from around the university to meet with and better understand their needs, as well as continue meeting with the Graduate Implementation team to better understand data and system configuration.
MD Phase 3 Operational Reporting Project
Description: This project focuses on reporting to support the MD Phase 3 enrollment and visiting student management. Specifically focused on recreating the Availability Overview and Combined Roster reports, it involves combining Workday Student data with visiting student data from the Monday system.
Progress: We just completed a project kick-off and are now focusing on initial discovery. Over the next couple of weeks, we will begin to document what data is needed from each system, define access requirements, explore data acquisition from Monday, identify project dependencies, and collect report formatting requirements.