Academics: The Year in Review 2019

Derek Nichols

Welcome back! For those how celebrated, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving season! We’re now rushing headlong into December and the end of the year. This week, we’re continuing our look back at the past 12 months and how each of the Blackbaud Education management products have evolved.

Last week focused on Enrollment management, but for today’s blog we’re tackling Academics. Just like last week, there’s a ton of content to cover, so don’t expect a deep dive into every topic. Still, you can expect to see plenty of highlights including all of our work on Report cards and transcripts, refreshed dashboard, and plenty more updates.

As I mentioned, there’s a ton to get to, so here’s a month by month look at everything we added to Academics in 2019.

January
The year began with a focus on user profiles by updating the Enrollment tab and renaming it to Groups. Not only that, we also made the Community groups appear from the user’s groups as well. From the list of community groups for a user, you can select a group to quickly access the group’s page and view the group’s bulletin board

In addition, we also added the suppress option to the edit column dialogue box in the course section of the Report Card.

February
February saw a few Gradebook enhancements arrive including new shortcut icons like ‘T’ for Tardy. We also made a subtle addition by removing the cross-out icon that appears when hovering over assignments that use a rubric for a hand icon.



We also updated the date field formatting for Canadian schools that use custom transcripts, putting the year first following by the month.

March
March became a very busy month for us as we unleashed multiple updates to the Academics product.

In terms of scheduling, we added the ability to specify a course gender from the Course requests tab for a course. Schedule maker takes this into account and will exclude students without gender or with the wrong gender from the course if a gender is specified for a course. We also cleaned up the Schedule tab to provide a way to select Any block or Selected blocks instead of viewing a list of all available blocks.

With our Transcript builder EAP still ongoing behind the scenes, we made a couple of enhancements to the existing report card and transcript builders. Specifically, we added line spacing for certain sections, the GPA label appeared in the GPA section on the builder, and added a feature that helps users center their widgets on the builder. We also added a days present column to the attendance section for grading managers working on Report Cards.

April
We showered the April release with plenty of quality of life updates including:

• Added GPA values to report card and transcript legends
• Added support for assessment comment only report cards
• Non-US countries were now displayed in the report card and transcript builder addresses.
• Horizontal space separators became available for grading managers to use in report cards and transcripts.
• Grading managers were able to set access for multiple report card and transcript templates that use the same grade plan.
• Provided access to a Review status filter in the Report card grades list.
• Bulk assign course requests using course codes.

May
May was our double feature month, providing you with 2 updates instead of the normal 1. We took advantage of the situation to add a ton of quality of life features.

New field options were added in for report card/transcript templates to be used in the default students and the school header. This includes options like student’s name, birth date, school name, main address, and more.


New fields were only the start as we also improved the overall drag and drop response time when working on report cards and transcripts and expanded the left navigation by default to help make it easier for users to see which header each section lives under. 


Generate master schedule and scheduling snapshots were updated to include conflicts for students based on class meeting exceptions set on the course level.


We also removed Create sections in bulk and replaced it with Create classes in bulk. As part of this change, schedule managers could create classes using the target number for classes set for each course or using a calculated number of classes.


Speaking of classes, we made updates to the Classes tab by adding additional columns such as class status and teacher status. We also added new filters for these fields as well as for departments.

June
With schools taking off for summer break, the Academics team continued chugging right along with new features and improvements.
In June, we focused on Report Cards by adding a Save option to the builder for grading managers to save and not have to close the page entirely. Past Students, Past Parents, and Alumni could now be given access to Report Cards and we even added an option for making Attempting credits a column when a GPA is added to a Report Card. 

July
The month many schools had been waiting for finally arrived as the new drag and drop Transcript Builder left EAP to go live for everyone. While this was the big-ticket item, we had even more in store this month.


Grading managers received a lot of new features this month including the ability to bulk print report cards and/or transcripts for departed students, preview a report card/transcript template, as well as add a grade translation to a numeric grade category even after grades are recorded.

The Academics dashboard was also overhauled this month to make it easier for users to quickly find what they need. This includes links to common tasks, items that need to be reviews, grades waiting for approval, attendance stats, and the day’s schedule.

August
In all fairness, August was a lighter month for updates compared to the past few months. Students were a big focus for us this month as we gave schools the power to display only the Head Advisor or All Advisors on a student’s profile from the Advisory. In addition, the Student Schedule - By Day Name (Grid) report was updated to include a landscape layout when printing.

Catch up on all the summer features that came to Academics right here.

September
After overhauling the Academics dashboard earlier in the year, September made a few further changes to it. Specifically, the What’s going on? tile was updated to give accurate attendance data for schools that record daily attendance and schools that record attendance differently depending on school level.



Also, the tile labeled Tasks, has an option to Add attendance for group that users could now Select All or Clear All.

Transcript builder also received new functionality in an effort to give users more control and make things a bit more intuitive. An outline was added to show which sections of a transcript are being impacted as you make your changes. Numerous bugs were also eradicated as well.

The last update this month impacted Manage classes to only open classes within the terms selected in the filter.

October
The spookiest month of the year included a number of ghoulishly great enhancements to Academics. First off, we updated the What’s going on? tile on the Academics dashboard, to give attendance managers quick access to unrecorded sections as well as a link to the Class attendance page.

On the scheduling side of the product, registrars could now filter classes by department or grade level.

November
As many of you may know, last month we made major improvements to the drag and drop mechanics of classes on the Master Schedule as well as tasks on the Academics dashboard. Want a more in-depth look at what changed? Check out our blog post.

We also made another small, yet impactful change this month by updating the Classes page to full width, meaning that you can now see all the columns without scrolling to the right.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2YcGDW1IkI


December
I’m not going to spoil the surprise of what the Academics team has in store for you all this month. All I’ll say is that we’re again taking a look at the Master Schedule and Transcript areas of the product. Thankfully, you won’t have to wait long as the blog post and release hit next week.

That’s all for Academics this year! Naturally it’s been quite the year and we do hope that these changes have helped make your experience better and easier in the long run. We have plenty more on deck for 2020, so make sure to stay tuned for what’s around the corner. Next week we’re taking a short break from the Year in Review blog series to finally reveal what’s coming in the December 2019 release. I’ll see you right back here next week!