An ERP administrator who was also a student wrote about what that experience taught them. It's worth reading.

Most writing about higher education technology is written from one side of the system. Administrators and IT professionals write about implementation, governance, and operations. Students describe their experience from the outside, as users of tools they didn't choose and can't change. There aren't many people positioned to write about both at once.

Ellucian published a post from an ERP administrator who was also enrolled as a student at the institution where they worked. The perspective that comes out of that is specific in a way that general user research rarely is. Things like the anxiety that comes from a confusing registration flow, the friction in financial aid status tracking, and the way a poorly designed portal can make an already stressful process feel worse, these show up differently when the person describing them has also spent time on the configuration side of the same system.

The post doesn't make a general argument about student experience. It makes a specific one: that the people building and maintaining higher ed technology systems have a different relationship to those systems than the students who depend on them, and that the gap between those two perspectives is where a lot of usability problems live.

For technology teams that don't often get direct feedback from students about day-to-day system friction, this is a useful read: https://www.ellucian.com/blog/when-technology-becomes-personal-student-and-it-perspective