UBC student develops Workday workaround to help with course registration

Students at the University of British Columbia (UBC) were not happy when the school switched to a new course registration system last month, but one student says he has come up with something that may help.

Computer science student Justin Cheung says he has developed a Chrome extension that changes Workday’s layout so that it looks like the previous, more familiar system.

UBC switched to the Workday system on May 21, and feedback was mostly negative, with students saying it was frustrating and stressful to deal with.

Cheung got the idea to create the extension after hearing other students’ complaints, and says he also had issues with it.

“It’s just hard to navigate,” he said

“It doesn’t feel user friendly at all. Searching for courses is a pain because it doesn’t categorise sections into like different modes. So it puts lectures and labs in the same list, and it’s really hard to look for them.”

Cheung says his Chrome extension mimics the previous system.

“So it compacts the course list into a nice little table,” he said.

The system has been widely criticized on the r/UBC page on Reddit, with users claiming the new system is difficult to access and overly complicated.

But Cheung says he has had a lot of positive feedback.

“There’s been a lot of positive comments,” he said.

“I’m really happy that there hasn’t been, like, really big bugs that someone felt the need to DM me about it.”

The extension is available for free. Students can find a link on r/UBC on Reddit.

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