The Month in Review: January 2021 Feature Releases

Derek Nichols

It’s a new year and a fresh start. Already the teams have hit the ground running so let’s take a look back at everything that arrived in January 2021 for the Education management products.Welcome to February everyone! It’s the start of a new month, which means it’s time for us to look back at everything that released for each of the Education management products.

Fresh off of the holiday season didn’t slow our teams down as January saw a lot of plenty to exiting new additions and changes. So before we find out what’s waiting for us in February, let’s take one last look back at January 2021. Enjoy!

Academics
This month in Academics, the team added a new display option for transcript rankings. Faculty can now display class rankings alongside each academic year and grade level on a student’s transcript. It’s worth noting that this feature only works if your particular school has already set up rank calculations. If not, then none will be available from the Rank calculation dropdown menu while in the Design form.

Other updates this month include:

• Setting a filter to hide any inactive blocks when in the Blocks section of Schedule outline.
• Assignment indicators have been added to the Learning progression slide out.
• The Withdrawal reason column on the Students list now displays information for students who have pending withdrawals.

Core
As expected from the heart of the Education management products, Core received a hefty amount of updates in January.

The biggest news is that SKY Reporting is now available for all schools. Essentially, SKY Reporting enables your school to view prebuilt dashboards and create custom dashboards with your choice of graphs and charts. Add your own filters to custom dashboards or select a data point to drill in for details. You can even export pre-configured dashboards for use in Microsoft Excel. To learn more about this new feature, have a look at our recent blog post.

Please note that support for Internet Explorer 11 is coming to an end to coincide with Microsoft ending support for it as well. You’ve probably already noticed but for IE11 users, a warning will appear on the login page to indicate it’s no longer a recommended internet browser. For now, we recommend using the most recent releases of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari for iOS, or Microsoft Edge.

In addition, Core also released:

• The workflow search used to link existing users to accounts has been improved, allowing platform managers to search for keywords like first name, last name, preferred name, the user ID, or email address.
• Completed jobs for uploaded files now have a filter to sort through the logged historical data.

Enrollment management
In the month of January, the Enrollment management team focused on wrapping up development on a brand new feature coming in February. Sorry for the tease, we’ll be talking about this very soon.

Outside of that, a couple of quality of life updates were made to Committee Review including a fix for those attempting to print them out. Now, you’ll find that the information is no longer squished together. In addition, the summary can now be printed right from the modal window in the Candidate for Review list.

Also this month:

• Admissions managers can now archive application forms.
• Recommendation date submitted is now an available column on the Process Recommendation list.
• The Candidate list now has a School decision date filter.

Tuition management/SmartAid
The Tuition management (formerly Smart Tuition) and SmartAid teams again had a good amount of updates for the month of January.
For the Smart Tuition schools, whenever a user makes a change to Manage Accounts, we’ve now added an audit log to review each change made. Admins will be able to see who made each change, when, the original info, and the new info. Results describe changes to a user’s contact, login, role, and status.

On the SmartAid side, a number of improvements were made to the parent mobile application in order to fit better on smaller screens. First, instead of seeing the full text for the button, they will only see part of it. In addition, the Chat button has been moved as it previously covered the Save and Continue button, fixed the video placement links, and parents can now upload documents as long as they are less than 100mb.

Other updates this month include:

• The Multiple Failed Payments Report now includes results for accounts with more than one failed payment; previously it included results with more than two failed payments. Additionally, it includes results from the entire school session, instead of only the previous 30 days.
• School online enrollment settings now default to the 2021 - 2022 school year. Families enrolling will now appear in the 21/22 school session and not 20/21.
• When charter users attempt to reach enroll.smarttuition.com, they’re now automatically redirected to https://enrollwithsmart.com/charter.
• (SmartAid) The video tutorials on the parent application have been updated to reflect any new changes made to the SmartAid parent site.
• (SmartAid) The mobile parent site was updated in January including moving the Chat button, fixed the video placement links, and parents can now upload documents as long as they are less than 100mb.
• (SmartAid) The Enrollment status column and filter have been added to the Budgets screen.
• (SmartAid) If an Enterprise is using a To-school budget, they must set an amount for each school to distribute. An Enterprise can change this amount at any time however we have now made it so that they cannot set the amount to distribute lower than the amount the school has already awarded to their students.

If you want the full and complete details of everything we’ve added to the Education management products in January, 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.

We hope these updates in January have made your work life easier on some level. There’s plenty more to talk about in the month of February, but we’ll save that for another day.

Make sure to stop by next week as we’ll be talking about Contracts and all of the brand new features and updates that have been made to them over the past few months. There’s a lot to discuss, so I hope you’ll join me once again next Tuesday. See you then!