Summer 2019 Recap: Academics

The final week of our 2019 Summer Recap blog series is here! Not sure what I’m talking about? These annual blogs are to help catch you up on everything the various teams here under the Blackbaud Education Management umbrella worked on over the summer months when schools are typically out on summer break.


In case you’ve missed any of them, here are all the products we’ve covered so far:

• Enrollment management
• Core
• School website
• API

Without further ado, let’s jump into the latest blog. Today we’re doing a deep dive into Academics, which as many of you know, is made up of two products: Learning management and School information systems. So why split them up? Let’s tackle both starting with SIS!

Academics Dashboard

Our new Academics dashboard allows academics managers to easily access many of their daily responsibilities right from the Home screen. This includes common tasks like taking attendance and reporting an infraction, items to review like course requests, grades to approve, and basic daily attendance and scheduling information.

 

Users also have access to Find me now on the dashboard which allows them to look up a specific student to view where they should be in the school and/or view their Academic profile. Information will display on the dashboard based on a user’s roles. Meaning, if a user has a grading manager role, they will see Grades to approve.

Transcript Builder

The SIS team spent the last year developing a more robust, easy to use Transcript builder for our schools. Much like the Report card builder, our Transcript builder is a drag and drop feature that allows users to see a template of the transcript as they are building it. Schools have more customization options than ever before and can manipulate the style of the transcript as well as the content. For more information about Transcript builder, view our help or check out this video!



Learning Management

Alright, let’s move on to what the Learning Management team has been up to as well.


While some of you may have noticed that the LMS team has been quieter than normal in terms of releasing new content over the past three months, it isn’t because they don’t have anything to say. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.


Truth be told, the team is very deep into development on a couple of important features that are currently at various stages of EAP. While I can’t go into too much detail on either considering they’re still in active development, but both are progressing nicely. Here’s a bit of information on both.

Competency Based Education

The first is Competency Based Education, which allows schools to move away from the traditional alpha numeric style grading. Instead, CBE focuses on skills and abilities, communicating the ones that students need to master and providing an alternative way to track their learning goals and progression.

Assignment Center

The second EAP feature we’re working on is a redesign of the Assignment Center under Faculty. We’re making it easier to find what you need faster and adding more options to make your experience better. More on this soon!


And that’s Academics in a summer nutshell! That leaves us with only one topic left, which you can read all about this coming Thursday.


For now, if you have any questions, comments, or anything else, leave a comment below and make sure to also hit that like button to let me know how you’re liking these posts. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you right back here on Thursday!