Beginning in March 2024, Iowa State switched from AccessPlus to Workday as its new student information system. For students who used AccessPlus, like Emma Pfantz, Workday can be complicated.
“When I was signing up for classes for the first time on [Workday], I just had the hardest time actually figuring out how to register for them,” said Pfantz, a junior in event management.
Pfantz said “AccessPlus was more simple” to get where you want to go on the website.
“I don’t think there is really any support for the transition to Workday because they just said ‘We’re switching,’ and then didn’t really give any advice for it or anything like that,” Pfantz said.
The transition from AccessPlus to Workday was announced by Iowa State in December 2022. It opened to students on March 4 so they could use the platform to sign up for fall classes. In preparation for the transition, the ISU Service Portal provided guides on using the new software and a university website was created that was exclusively dedicated to getting help with Workday.
“Workday made registering for classes way easier, but at the same time, trying to find something can take a little while, so kind of 50/50 on it,” said Katie Wilkes, a first-year biology major. “I would give it a six and a half out of 10 because it was way easier to register for classes, and it was way less stressful than the first time I had to register.”
Carson Propst, a senior in mechanical engineering, said he thought Workday is far more complicated than AccessPlus.
“Especially having to click through three or four tabs to get to my schedule, but at the same time, the schedule does look nicer and clearer,” Propst said.
Propst also said one of the challenges he found was during registration.
“I just sat down and worked on it for a couple of hours,” Propst said. “Advisors sent out things to help the transition to Workday. However, I think they could have done better at advertising their helpline. They kind of only told people about it after the registration period.”
“I think it’s okay… I’m a bit confused as to why Iowa State chose Workday of all things,” Propst said. “I do not think Workday is an improvement over AccessPlus, mainly because AccessPlus was made specifically for Iowa State, whereas Workday was not.”
For information and FAQs about the Workday implementation, visit this website.
Ellis | Aug 29, 2024 at 1:37 pm
Right there with you. A lot of the permissions for us GA instructors still aren’t set up correctly yet. I have to hound my students for their advisor info and any basic demographic stuff like what year they are instead of just being able to click a button to find it. I had to look up each and every one of my fifty (50) students MANUALLY in outlook in order to get their email addresses, which is a maaaajor issue. 50 is a lot for the kind of class I teach, but I know other instructors are teaching 100+ students. If their department’s permissions still aren’t set up correctly like ours aren’t, then how on earth are they expected to email anyone? This info used to be available on our class rosters in accessplus — why hasn’t it been made available for us in workday?? The student photos are also not listed as confidential on Workday afaik….which seems like quite the privacy concern (they were listed as confidential on accessplus and we were instructed to shred all physical copies when we were done with them). There are so many issues. I don’t know why they couldn’t have just improved accessplus instead of migrating us all over to workday, which is not intuitively arranged whatsoever.