The Month in Review: September 2020 Feature Releases

Derek Nichols

October is here, which means the cooler weather, falling leaves, and of course, Halloween! For us though, it also means it’s time to review what happened in the month of September. Here’s the complete list of everything we released to the Education Management products.We deep into Autumn now! Here’s hoping your month back in school so far has been easier or, at the very least, better than you thought going in.

With another month in the books, it’s once again time to look back through the past four weeks of September, recapping everything that has changed or been added to the Education management products. Here’s everything you need to know for September 2020.

Academics
Last month, Academics added a ton of new content to BBEM. 

Attendance managers now have access to the Virtual attendance type, which can be used for students working remotely. Attendance managers can set up a new attendance category by going to Attendance, Attendance setup, and opening the Attendance categories tab. Select + Add Category, and pick a name for the category. Under Attendance Reason(s), the Type menu now has three options: Absence, Tardy, and Virtual. Set the Status to Active and set Faculty Access to Yes. This information can also be viewed in the Class attendance list.

User interface updates! Specifically, changing assignment preferences. These settings are split up into three different categories: Assignment creation, Assignment lists, Assignment list preferences (select defaults for column to sort by, filter by due date and publish status), and Assignment imports. In addition, we have added Assignment import options so teachers can control who can import their assignments.

Schools can elect to allow their teachers to set their own Computation method for Content-area skills from their Gradebooks. If this setting has been enabled, teachers will have access to a Mastery option in their Gradebook. From here, they’ll be able to select a computation method as well as apply it to other sections if needed. Both Mastery overview and student Learning progressions will reflect the computation method set by the teacher.

Other updates this month include:

• When exporting a Students list that includes the Photo column, the resulting spreadsheet will include the URL for each student’s photo.
• In Section assignments and the Assignment center, assignments that are not added to the Gradebook will appear with the Graded column empty.
• Learning progressions will no longer appear on a student’s profile if Mastery is turned off for their School level.
• When a registrar enters grades for student transcripts, they can enter abbreviations for transfer courses with long names. This ensures that transfer courses appear in a way that’s consistent with the school’s own internal courses.
• When an Admin exports their school’s mastery data, the results include a new column that indicates whether teacher calculations are used. The column shows 0 for false and 1 for true.
• Teachers can now use subscript and superscript when formatting their assignments.
• Teachers can now change their preferences to choose whether to share their assignments. If a teacher’s assignments are not shared, they won’t appear available to other teachers. By default, assignments are shared.
• Attendance managers can now change the sort order for all attendance categories except Attended Class.
• You can sort the Student enrollment list according to the number of unfulfilled requests for a student in the selected term and the number of classes a student is enrolled in for the selected term.
• When reporting an infraction, the student name search bar has been optimized to search by first and last name in cases where a student has a different preferred name.
• When viewing the Master Schedule, select the name of any class to see details in a popover menu including the teacher name, scheduling block, target size, and current size. The popover menu also includes links to View enrolled students and View other classes at same time. Click anywhere outside of the popover menu to return to the main schedule view.

Core
In September, the Core team made an important update to Blackbaud ID. When a user is invited to connect with Blackbaud ID for authentication, the invite link now takes them directly to the BBID sign in page to accept the invitation and create their log in details. With an account created, the confirmation email now has a link that takes them directly to the app, no longer forcing the user to select Need an account? anymore.

Not only that, when you enable or disable tasks for a role and then impersonate the user, the effects are immediately visible during the impersonation. This makes it easier to verify the change has the effects you intended.

In addition, other Core updates this month include:

• The Class Code field now populates in the Classes object for OneRoster.
• User photo and personal/public biography now feature audit logging tools under View Profile Changes.
• When a platform manager handles Profile Access tasks (select Core, Security, Profile access) any instance of the label “Nickname” is now “Preferred name.”
• Admins can now filter by Communication type from a User's Contact Card.

Enrollment management
This month in Enrollment management, Contracts were in our sights for a few improvements. Individual enrollment fees on a Fee Schedule block can now be hidden as needed. Admissions managers can toggle a setting to auto-process an individual contract. Not only that, Re-enrollment managers now have access to a Contract labels option from Manage contract forms. Select Contract Labels to open a new modal window that replaces how the word Contract appears to responsible signers.

Some of you may also have noticed that Worklists are no longer available in Enrollment management. Instead, we encourage admissions managers to use the Candidate list going forward.

But that’s not all!

• Staff and admissions managers assigned to a checklist can now view comments in the process list.
• Admissions managers now have a better organized filter list on the candidate list. We've added additional categories as well as moving certain filters to make them easier to find.
• We've made some background changes to improve the processing performance in a number of areas of Enrollment management including when using the rating calculation on the Process Recommendations list.
• Admissions managers now have Parent cell phone numbers column and the No Candidate Decision filter from the Candidate List.
• Admissions managers now have a date range filter for applications processed as well as inquiries processed on the Candidate list.
• When the Show to parent notification option enabled for a student checklist step, it now includes users with the parental access flag enabled.

School website
While not quite as flashy as some of the other additions this month, the School website team has made some important quality of life updates to the product. The Content section of the product has seen changes to the Brief Description and Long Description. Essentially, we’ve increased the text field sizes to help make them easier to read. You’ll find these changes inside of Content for Lists, Links, News, Events, Text, and Downloads.

Other updates to School website this month include:

• Preferred Name has also officially replaced Nickname under Curriculum details as well as Department faculty options.
• Grad year can now be displayed from the Directory widget.
• Users can display grade levels when setting up Department faculty field options in a curriculum detail.
• Inside of the Curriculum details faculty list, the grad year now displays next to the faculty name and short year which makes it consistent with other areas of the product, like the internal directory.

If you want the full and complete details of everything we’ve added to the Education management products in September, make sure to visit our weekly What’s New letter. Use the Recent option at the top of the page to view past and archived releases. Want to stay updated whenever we have a new release? Get notified via email by signing up for our mailing list here.

That’s going to do it for this recap for September 2020. We’ve got some really good stuff lined up for October, so make sure to stay tuned in the weeks ahead! Also, we hope you enjoy the virtual festivities at BBCon this week as well. As always, stay safe and we’ll talk again next week!