The Month in Review: April 2020 Feature Releases

Derek Nichols

We’ve come to the end of the road of April 2020 and this new way of life. Before we head into May, let’s have one last look back at everything we released in April.Month two of this new way of life is in the books and I hope you’re all still doing as well as possible in this unique time we find ourselves in. While we continue to wait for better days ahead, we’ve continued out work at creating new content as quickly as possible through videos, these blog posts, and more to help you as best as we can.

Life continues to move forward, just like our product updates. A lot happened over these past four weeks and as we like to do at the end of each month, let’s take one look back at April.

Academics
With Academics in high demand as this point thanks to schools moving to remote learning, the Academics teams have made sure to not rock the boat too hard, while also providing important features. In April, we added a new option for viewing, printing, and exporting teacher and student schedules in the landscape style view.

Assessments received a ton of attention this month in an effort to further improve your experience. There are just a ton of new features so here’s a quick breakdown in list format!

• Assessments now auto-save student progress when they’re still working on it and the time runs out.
• Students can manually save assessments as they work through them with the Save and continue button.
• Faculty can also change the Time to complete for students that may need extra time on Assessments.
• HTML special characters can now be used as well as other formatting options when adding answers for multiple choice questions on an assessment.
• Faculty can now view student answers on Assessments before the work is submitted.
• When a teacher is bulk grading an assessment from the Gradebook, they can view the status of the assessment while selecting students.
• The report card builder now supports up to 255 characters for assessment skill labels.

Core
In April, we gave platform and data managers the ability to export data as a zipped comma separated value (csv) file for use with OneRoster integrations.

Speaking of exporting data, CSV files for exported user data now include Race and Ethnicity values.

Enrollment management
When a contract is completed by an admin, parents now see a message saying that the contract has been manually accepted by an administrator. In addition, re/Enrollment managers now have a previously generated indicator when inside the Generate Contracts modal.

We’ve updated contracts so that if they’ve already been viewed or started, the responsible signer can no longer be changed by administrators when adding new users from a contact card or merging user relationships.

School Website
There are more Athletics related updates this month from the School website team. The roster widget now shows the Captain icon to prevent users from having to actually drill down into the roster tab to find it.

Coaches and athletic managers can also now create general events right from the team group page.

Finally, the UI has received a few updates to better align the team page display. The tab menu is now left aligned to the team name and the first item in the schedule now aligns with the rest of the schedule items.

If you want the full and complete details of everything we’ve added to the Education management products (including the update for today), make sure to visit our release letter to see what’s new. Use the Recent option at the top of the page to view past and archived releases.

Some of you may have also noticed we had a special update this month releasing new Assessment related content on a Saturday. This won’t become a constant thing, but we wanted to reduce the potential strain as this is an area of the product that’s currently in high demand.

Please note that due to the shift to distance learning and our schools depending on our solutions now more than ever, we are trying to strike the balance between minimizing potential disruption with being responsive to feedback. We hope these updates as well as the recent content we’ve launched have helped in some way.

Don’t forget, we’re continuing to add resources to a number of locations including:

• Distance Learning Video Playlist
• Resources and Links Blog
• Teacher Specific Remote Learning Online Help
• Parent Specific Remote Learning Resources

As always, I hope you all stay well and stay safe. It feels like a lifetime since all of this has started and I’ll fully admit that I miss and appreciate the simple things of day to day life. We are in this together everyone. See you next week.

 

Joseph ONeill

Is the time on an assignment posting now defaulting to 11:59 pm if the teacher doesn't enter a time along with a due date?

Derek Nichols

Hi Joseph ONeill‍, so to answer your question, that value has always defaulted to 11:59 but this update now allows you to change it to whatever time you want. However, we do understand that this may not be ideal, especially if you have multiple assignments to maintain. As such, the LMS team is continuing to work on this feature. In fact, we have an Idea forum currently active which relates to this very topic: https://community.blackbaud.com/products/k12/ideas