Need Help with Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions for Hybrid Remote Learning

Judy Watson

Hello fellow educators and technology enthusiasts,

I hope this message finds you well. I'm a teacher who's passionate about enhancing the learning experience for my students through technology. I'm currently facing a challenge related to Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions in the context of hybrid remote learning, and I'm hoping to connect with experienced individuals who can offer some guidance.

Here's what's going on: My school has adopted Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions to streamline various aspects of our educational processes. While I recognize its potential benefits, I'm encountering some difficulties in fully leveraging these solutions for our hybrid remote learning setup.

As a teacher, I want to make the most of these tools to ensure that both my in-person and remote students have a seamless learning experience. However, I'm encountering some roadblocks that I'm not sure how to address.

Can any of you provide insights into effectively using Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions for hybrid remote learning? I'd greatly appreciate any advice or guidance on how to navigate this challenge and make the most of these tools in our unique educational environment.

Here are some specific questions I have:

How can I optimize Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions to facilitate engagement and interaction among my students, both in the classroom and remotely?
Are there any specific features or strategies within the solutions that can enhance hybrid remote learning experiences?
What are some best practices or success stories from fellow educators who have successfully integrated Blackbaud solutions into their hybrid teaching methods?
I apologize if these questions seem elementary, but I'm committed to providing the best possible learning experience for my students and could use your expertise to guide me.

If any of you have experience with Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions or hybrid remote learning, I'd be incredibly grateful for your insights. Please share your thoughts, advice, or any resources that might assist me in overcoming this challenge.

Thank you all so much for your understanding and assistance. I'm looking forward to learning from your expertise and applying it to my teaching journey.

Michael Morrissette

Hi @Judy Watson -

Glad to see you reaching out and starting this conversation! Hybrid learning is certainly a challenge in making sure that all students receive an equitable experience in their education journey and starting this conversation is a great way of bringing light to said challenge.

I would encourage checking out our virtual learning playlist. There are a lot of great resources there that outline various features available natively in the LMS. The ones I would encourage most are the Bulletin Board, Topics, and Assignment/Discussion/Assessment videos.

Our LMS is also compliant with several LTI resources, for both the 1.1 and 1.3 connection types. These tools can be added to things like Assignments and Topics to supplement more niche use cases that our LMS can't provide natively. Lots of great tools out there, so I really encourage checking this out and seeing if any of them work for you situation. This does require some admin-level setup before the tool is accessible in the LMS, however. Here's some documentation on setting up LTIs.

If you have any specific challenges or use cases you'd like to chat through, let us know down in the comments. We might be able to give some better advice depending on the given situation you're encountering.

-Mike

Megan Day

@Judy Watson
Hi Judy! Unfortunately, in our experience we have found Blackbaud to be lacking in features to support instructional models other than a traditional in-person school day. We have been piloting online asynchronous classes in our high school and while I realize hybrid is definitely a different beast there is overlap in teaching strategies. Here are some of the things we've found:

• For online asynchronous, there is a definite need for students to complete assignments in a specific order. In other words, they need to finish Assignment 1 before moving on to Assignment 2. There isn't anyway for an assignment to “unlock” with the completion of another assignment. Our workarounds is to number assignments. Unfortunately, showing students how to “sort” their assignment center by assignment title doesn't actually sort them numerically and it also causes all sorts of headaches when a teacher needs to add/delete an assignment but it's been our best solution so far.
• Online discussions - Online discussions give the option to not let students see other student's posts until submitting their own post. However, a student can post just some lines of gibberish, look at the rest of the posts, then edit their original post. There is no way for a teacher to see the revision history or even if the student has edited.
• General “Course Building” or “modules” don't exist. Other LMS systems have great drag/drop/flip-of-a-switch course builders where teachers can create modules. We have basically been creating curriculum maps/scope and sequence documents on Google Docs and then have to recreate assignments and resources over in Blackbaud LMS through a combination of Assignments and Topics. Something that may not matter as much for you but has been tricky for us is not having the ability to just “copy” a course from year to year. While there are ways to import the various “pieces” of Bulletin Boards, Topics, and Assignments, there isn't a way for teacher A to run a course one year and then teacher B jump in and teach the course the following year.
• Very little reporting or easy-to-use data that is accessible to teachers. Trying to train teachers to use reports is difficult. Having some sort of a dashboard where teachers could get a birds-eye view of most recently submitted assignments, tracking a students progress over time, even the last time a student logged in, etc. would be so useful for our teachers (even with our traditional classes).
• Very little ability to do much of anything with videos. Our teachers have struggled to get videos to upload or play back for students. Once a video is uploaded, there isn't any sort of “repository” of the videos or files you upload. They only live on the topic or assignment you uploaded them to so most just upload videos to Google Drive, set the correct sharing permissions, and then link wherever needed in Blackbaud. (This also relates to the issues we have with copying classes. All these links go to external sites where a new teacher might not have the right permissions to access.)
• LTI integrations are ok at best. We've used them for Google Assignments, Turnitin, and EdPuzzle. With LTI you're at the mercy of two different platforms working well together. The only one we really feel works well is Turnitin. The other two have a lot of things that just don't work well. We completely ditched the EdPuzzle integration and I tell teachers not to use the Google Assignments integration until they've met with me and understand the list of caveats they should prepare for. You can search the Discussions here for more on that. Also in most cases you have to pay a great deal of money for the LTI integration because the licenses are for ALL of your students. You don't have the option to just use the integration with 1-2 classes. This is one of the reasons we've chosen to not use an LTI integration with most of the 3rd party tools our teachers use. It's an all or nothing approach.

With all this being said, I did successfully teach an online asynchronous class this summer using Blackbaud LMS. It's possible, but there is a lot of extra work and thought that goes into designing the course in a way that will work for non-traditional classrooms.

I posted in the Community back in January also looking for some feedback from other teachers or advice on what works/doesn't work but didn't get any responses. I hope you get additional responses so we can both learn from other's experiences!