The Month in Review: November 2020 Feature Releases

Derek Nichols

Well, we finally made it. December 2020. It’s been a wild year, but before the holiday season truly arrives, it’s time to take a moment to look back at everything we added to the Education management products in November.The last month of 2020 is finally here which means that 2021 is right around the corner as well as a whole holiday celebration. We’re not ready to call it a year quite yet though.

With December here, it’s time to once again reflect on the past and keep you updated with details you may have missed. Let’s dive back in to everything that happened in November 2020 for the Education management products. Let’s get started!

Academics
As usual, the teams that make up Academics were incredibly busy in the month of November.

The Academics dashboard received even more context-specific help updates this month. Users will see a small ‘?’ icon on many of the available tiles from the Academics dashboard. Selecting them will open will pull up the specific help page inside of the panel. This month brought targeted help to Items to review, Today Is, Grades to approve, Find me now, and What’s going on? tiles.

Enrollment Types were another big focus this month. For those who may not know, Enrollment types allow you to control the following parameters for each student's course enrollment: Credits, Possible grades, and Attendance. The default types can be found under Scheduling then Schedule outline and include Regular, Audit, Independent Study, and Pass/Fail. For more on this feature, please visit our help documentation.

Other updates this month include:

• Assignment detail pages will now load for all assignment types instead of just online submissions.
• Teachers now only see missing assignments for their sections when viewing missing work for students in their course roster.
• The default publishing setting for Assessments is now set to No.
• Teachers can now change the text to draw attention to keywords and phrases, or to make assignments more accessible to students who need visual assistance. 

Core
Users were a big focus for the Core team in November, adding the ability for platform managers to add new users from their Core Home Page. This replaces the old method of first having to go into the Users settings from the Core dropdown menu.

In addition, when a platform or contact card manager edits a user profile and adds a related individual, they can also specify whether the new person will be a user and whether they should get an invite to log in through Blackbaud ID.

This month also saw the first wave of updates for the new Dashboard Builder feature. As the feature becomes available, schools will find it under Analysis in the main navigation menu if you’re logged in with Blackbaud ID and have security access to dashboards. For more on this new feature, check out our main documentation here.

Enrollment management
In the month of November, the EMS team spent a lot of time tweaking checklists. Video uploads were a big focus and now parents can upload common video types to checklists while administrators can upload them to candidate profiles. The Assigned Checklist list no longer displays archived checklists for student checklist administrators. Lastly, when managing checklists, data that extends beyond the word limit now have a See more option to expand the view. Select Show less to compress the list once again.

We’ve updated Application forms and Candidate records for admissions managers to include new educational support questions. These can be set to not required and can be hidden on the application template as well. New questions include:

• Does the candidate have a 504?
• Does the candidate have an IEP? 
• Does the candidate have a private evaluation? 

In addition, the EMS product also gained the following updates in October:

• Admissions managers can now view interview and visit notes as a tile option for review committees.
• Re/enrollment managers can now archive contracts using a new Yes/No setting. Archived contracts are considered inactive and can’t be edited.
• In regards to School Forms, if a manager has access to them within Core, they now have the ability to print them as well.

Tuition management/SmartAid
Another busy month for the Tuition management (formerly Smart Tuition) and SmartAid teams. This month we made Blackbaud ID single sign on available for Tuition management users.

Tuition management also enabled a few automatic debit settings this month as well. when you manage accounts and edit the settings for automatic debits, the option to Block 18 Days is now Block Next Reattempt.  Select this option to prevent Tuition Management from automatically retrying the next scheduled direct debit attempt.  Likewise, the option to undo this setting is now Unblock Next Reattempt.

In addition, for the classic version of Smart Tuition, we’ve restricted certain automatic debit options. When users need to switch a family’s payment method or plan, stop automatic payments, or block automatic reattempts of fail payments, they must now configure this from www.smarttuition.com instead.

Other updates this month include:

• (SmartAid) Applications can now include special characters like hyphens and apostrophes.
• (SmartAid) When a parent remarries after being divorced, additional data entry fields now automatically appear in the parent’s view of an application. This allows them to enter information about the stepparent, rather than having to contact the school directly to have them manually enter the new data.
• The custom billing & accrual report now exports with Total Enrollment Fees and Total Shopping Cart fees as part of the summary.
• Viewing the list of users under Manage Accounts now features filters to sort between users that have been marked as Inactive or Active.

The Wrap Up

If you want the full and complete details of everything we’ve added to the Education management products in August, make sure to visit our 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 week as well as 2020 in genera as we’re signing off in advance of the holiday break. Thank you for stopping by and checking out our new content, whether you’re a longtime reader or a newcomer. 2020 has been a difficult year for so many and I hope that these weekly blog posts were able to help make your life easier at work, no matter how small.

I also want to take this opportunity to wish each and every one of you a safe and happy holiday season and New Year. I’ll see you right back here in 2021 when we kick things back into high gear here on the blog in January.