June 2023 Feature Releases For Blackbaud's education management portfolio

The summer rolls on into July, and for many of you, that means some warmer temperatures will be rolling in! While you enjoy the poolside, beachy sands, or inside with A/C, let us handle the June Month in Review!Believe it or not, July is finally here! While you enjoy your time out in the sun or inside, away from the heat, we’re still cranking out new content over here. If you haven’t yet, make sure to catch up on all of our latest blogs, including the Annual Procedures and what else we have planned in the next month or two.



However, since it’s the start of a new month, that means it’s time to take one last look back at all of the latest features and updates to arrive for Blackbaud's education management solutions during the month of June. So, let’s get started!



Academics:



This month, the Academics team released a new update for Faculty working with assessments. Faculty can now convert assessments created with the old builder to the new experience by copying or importing the old assessments. Assessments created with the old builder can no longer be copied or imported without converting.



Faculty can convert multiple assessments at once using Import Assignments. They can also select additional class sections to add an assessment to when importing, whereas copying will only add an assessment to the original class sections. New instances of an assessment created by import will have the same name as the original assessment. While you can set the Publish status on new instances of an assessment via import, you must mark assessments Ready for taking before students can begin the assessment.



Also in June:

• Grading Managers can now export the data used to calculate a student's GPA to Excel.
• Faculty can now resize text fields when adding or editing assignments. Select and drag the bottom border to expand a field to accommodate a long Description, Discussion prompt, or Title.
• When creating assessments, teachers now have superscript, subscript, underline, and strikethrough options to format text in the introduction, questions, and answers.
• Enabling Allow now allows students to continue the assessment independently regardless of how their connection was interrupted. Before this change, students could only resume an assessment if they selected Close to exit.
• The web address for the Student enrollment worklist has changed. Previously the URL would include “sis-scheduling,” but now it ends with “sis-enrollment/student-enrollment-worklist.” If you have saved a bookmark to this page, you will need to navigate to it again by selecting Scheduling, Requests and schedules, then Student enrollment. Other URLs will be updated soon for pages related to scheduling and enrollment.

Blackbaud Billing Management™:



Billing clerks now have more flexibility regarding handling failed payments. By selecting the new Handle payment option on the Failed payments page, Billing clerks can exclude payments from balance calculations and stop them from being applied to charges; for example, Billing clerks cannot Apply charges to handled payments from the transactions record. To handle payments, go to the Overview in Billing Management and select Review failed payments under Needs attention. Choose from the list of failed payments and select Handle payment.



More updates in June:

• Canadian payers can now save direct debit payment methods exclusively using the Payment Methods page in the Payer portal. Saved direct debit payment methods are eligible to be used in payments three days after being added.
• Payers can take advantage of saving direct debit information by logging in, selecting Billing in the navigation, and then selecting Payment methods. Once on the Payment methods page, select Add bank account.

Core:



Lists specifically designed for Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) are now generally available. To get started, you can check out this tutorial, which includes instructions and visuals to help you use the new lists to find, export, and organize data for IPEDS.



As of this release, when Candidate fields contain multiple items, the items are separated by a line break instead of a slash mark. Additionally, the applicant column category is renamed to Addresses.



Blackbaud Enrollment Management System™:



After an admissions manager archives a checklist, they'll no longer see it in any place where they can assign or filter on checklists/related checklist items. This includes areas like Process Inquiries, Needs checklist, Process applications, Process event registrations, etc. A big thank you to our community, as this feature originated from the K-12 Ideas forum.



Other updates this month:

• Admissions inquiry forms now feature a Global Privacy Control field for admissions candidates. This toggle allows schools to discern the privacy preferences of admissions candidates. When Global Privacy Control is set to Enabled, the candidate is communicating that they do not want their data shared with third-party organizations.

Extracurricular:



When viewing the Roster tab on Team pages, users will now see names on the roster follow the format set in Core > Users > User profile settings > User name formats. With this change, Preferred name displays for all players if included in the User Name Format configured in Core.



That’s going to do it for June 2023. We have plenty more planned, so stay up to date by subscribing and don’t miss a thing. See you right back here next week for more Blackbaud's education management portfolio content!