Blackbaud’s Education Management Solutions: What’s New For October 31, 2023

Derek Nichols · October 2023

Here are the latest changes, updates, and new features for the Education management products for October 31, 2023.

Academics

Exclude grades from grade average calculations

A few weeks ago, we added a setting on course records for administrators to indicate that a course can be retaken. Now that students can take a course more than once, there may be instances where you need to exclude specific grades from an individual student’s grade average calculations. For example, your school’s grading policy may state that only the most recent grade is included in calculations when a student has taken a course multiple times.

With this release, we added the ability for Grading Managers to indicate whether or not a grade should be included in grade average calculations at the individual student level. All grades are marked Include in grade averages by default.

To exclude a grade from calculations:

In Academics, select Grades, Grades management, then Enter grades by student.
Select the School Year, then use Search or select the first letter of the student's last name to find the student.
Under the student's name, select View next to Grades & Credits.
Use the School Year and Course filters to locate the course and grade.
Select Edit.
Disable Include in grade averages under the grade.
Select Save.

By default, grade average calculations respect the Include in grade averages designation. However, Grading Managers can select Ignore the Include in grade averages designation in a calculation to include grades without the Include in grade averages option enabled.

In Academics, select Grades, Grading setup, then Calculations.
Select Add grade average calculation or select Edit next to an existing calculation.
Enable Ignore Include in grade average designation.
Select Save & Close.

We also added a new column and filter to the Report card grades list so administrators can easily review the Include in grade average designation on student grades and identify student grades with or without that indicator enabled.

Add the new column:

Select Columns.
Select Include in grade average.
Select Apply changes.

Add the new filter:

Select Filters, then Grades.
Set Include in grade average calculations to Yes or No.
Select Apply filters.

Conduct

We've added a number of quality-of-life improvements for conduct based on community feedback through the Ideas portal. Thank you to everyone that contributed and voted.

Conduct managers can set up email notification reminders for parents of students. When editing a consequence, conduct managers can add email notification details as well as setting how far in advance they should be sent out.
When working with email notifications on the Infractions page, conduct managers can now add placeholder values for the infraction consequences on the e-mail template. Once the email notification is created, it will replace the placeholder with a comma delimited list of consequences configured for the Infraction and the number of occurrences.
Previously, notifications were sent to all conduct managers. With this update, notifications now respect restrictions set by the school in limiting which conduct managers are notified.

Scheduling

When making a block schedule change to a meeting time on a class section, past meeting times are no longer overwritten with the new times. To prevent impacting attendance, which had been impacted by mismatched meeting times, we now preserve past meeting times for sections through scheduling exceptions.

Core

Update user's employment

Recently, we updated the Access tab of user profiles in Core to show current and pending employment information via a tile, instead of a separate page.

With this release, we updated the Edit employment experience used by platform managers to our modern user interface. Instead of scrolling down a single, long page, you’ll work in smaller sections (such as Department or Sports) and scroll less. We’ve also made it easier to:

confirm which departments, grade levels, and athletic seasons apply
understand what is affected by selections in each area
identify pending employment changes
find departments in an alphabetized list

This significantly improves usability.

User profile: View content editor access

Users with rights to view the Access tab of the Core profile will notice a new Content editor access tile, which shows additional access information at a glance. If the user has access to a group and can manage content for it, then the user interface now lists the:

Group type (such as Activity, Classes, or Community)
Content access group

Previously, platform managers had to go to Core, Security, Content editor access and explore all tabs on the page to view this information. You’ll still go there to change their access.

User profile: View pushpage editor access

Users with rights to view the Access tab of the Core profile will notice a new Pushpage editor access tile, which shows additional access information at a glance. If the user has access to manage content for pushpages and send issues, then the user interface now lists the:

Group name
Template name

Previously, platform managers had to go to Core, Security, Pushpage editor access to view this information. You’ll still go there to change their access.

User profile: Indicate group leader

When you view a user’s profile in Core, the Groups tab now indicates when the user is a leader of a Community group. This enables platform managers to review a user’s leadership without the extra “clicks” of looking at each group page or lists.

Manage Roles

With this release, we’ve made a number of small enhancements to make it easier for platform managers to view and update roles and tasks. These include:

When you view a cloned a role, the base role now also appears in the header for cloned role
Showing a pencil icon and renaming Edit to Edit tasks.
Updated buttons and position for “expand all” and “collapse all”
Improved spacing, padding, and font size

API and Integrations

School API

New

Each of the listed endpoints is in BETA and may be removed or replaced with a 90-day deprecation period.

Retrieve medical allergies for a student

We’ve added a new endpoint for retrieving medical allergy for a student.

- GET Medical allergies for a student (BETA) returns an array of medical allergy objects for a student based on the corresponding user_id parameter included in the request.

Retrieve medical conditions for a student

We’ve added a new endpoint for retrieving medical conditions for a student.

- GET Medical conditions for a student (BETA) returns an array of medical condition objects for a student based on the corresponding user_id parameter included in the request.

.

Legacy ON API

Changed

We’ve changed the structure of the JSON request body required for POST Candidate from User.

The new JSON request body for the endpoint is:

{

"UserId": 0,

"EnteringYear": "string",

"EnteringGradeId": 0,

"ChecklistId": 0

}

School API and OneRoster API

For information about recently added endpoints and other updates, view the School API and OneRoster API changelog.

Subscribe to “What’s New”

To receive email notifications when the What’s new update appears, make sure to subscribe to the K12 community’s blog by logging into the community site and selecting the Subscribe button.

To manage your community subscriptions:

Log into the community and locate your name and profile picture in the upper right corner.
Select the drop-down arrow and select My Account.
From the My Account page, select the Subscriptions tab and scroll down to the Blogs section.
Locate Blackbaud K-12 Education solutions Blog. If you want to be notified as soon as the What’s new content goes live on the community, select the Instant option. You can also opt for Daily and Weekly notifications.
Scroll to the end of the page and select Save changes.

What’s Recent

Missed any of our weekly releases? You can catch up on everything in our Month in Review blog posts, which cover every feature and update Education management releases each month.

Daphne Weppner · October 2023

Thank you so much for the ability to exclude grades in the GPA! This is a GREAT help! ??

Veronica Esclamado · November 2023

Please bring back the function to undo a change to employment. When a new hire changes their mind, I do not want them showing as a past employee. This happens a lot with coaches.