The Month in Review: November 2021 Feature Releases

Derek Nichols

Is it really almost time for the Holidays? I don’t know about you but the year has certainly flown by. While we may be in the last month of the year, let’s take one final look back at everything we added to the Education management products in November 2021.The magic of the holiday season is now right around the corner, which means it’s almost time for this blog to go into Holiday Hibernation for a few weeks. Before we slumber away, there’s still some things we need to get to including looking back at everything we added, updated, and changed in the month of November.

As expected, there’s plenty of new updates, features, and fixes to get to, so let’s not waste any more time and jump right in, shall we?

Academics
As expected, it was another busy month for the Academics teams. Waivers and Exemptions got an update this month, so that when applying one to a student’s diploma requirements, the “credits complete” and “credits needed” figures will more accurately reflect the underlying process. On a student’s academic profile, go to the Requirements tab, expand one of the requirement groups under an existing diploma, and select the context menu (…) beside a requirement to either select Waiver or Exemption.

When adding or editing a Requirement for a Diploma or Area of study, information will now be organized in three areas accessible via a menu on the left side of the screen: Requirement details, Courses, and Group settings. The Requirement details area includes the following fields: Requirement name, Requirement group, General Elective Requirement, Minimum credits needed, and Process order. If you select General Elective Requirement, an optional Maximum credits needed field will appear.

In addition:

• When using Edit student enrollment, the Find a section tool will display up to 50 results at once. Previously the limit was 25 results. This includes Student enrollment, Requests and recommendations, and the Generate Student Schedule student worklist pages.
• Grading Managers can view a student’s grade averages by Session within an academic year.
• Academic Group Managers can view seating charts for all classes. The ability to edit seating charts and take attendance via seating charts is still restricted to faculty members only.
• When viewing an assignment type in a student’s gradebook, teachers can select to view or hide the Class average for the assignment type.
• Teachers can view submitted times for files submitted by students.
• Students will no longer be able to submit assignments that have online submissions required without adding files or text to the assignment. They will receive an error and must add a file or text to submit the assignment.
• Teachers can now see the Student preview of an assignment from the Assignment details page using See student preview.
• Teachers can select if they would like to receive notifications when a student shares a Google Drive file for an assignment.
• Teachers can now access Assignment details from the Gradebook.
• If a teacher would like to remove any existing staged or committed comments, evaluations, or point adjustments for a student’s rubric they can now clear the rubric.
• When a rubric is added to an assignment, teachers can use See rubric to verify that they have selected the correct rubric before creating the assignment.
• Teachers will see a blue bar on the assignment column if there are staged skill ratings and/or comments.
• The Grade plan groups page has a new and improved layout. To see it, go to Grades, Grading setup, then Grade plan groups.
• The Diploma page in Grading setup is now full-screen width, so it will adapt to the width of your browser window automatically.
• The Requirements page for Diplomas and Areas of study has been reorganized and is now full-screen width. It will automatically adjust to the width of your internet browser window.
• Diploma managers can use Compare requirements to visualize a student’s progress and required credits for a hypothetical new Diploma, Major, Minor, and/or Concentration.
• Teachers can view additional information about skills from the Assignment details page. When a teacher selects a skill, a pop-up will appear with key information about the skill including the skill type and description.

Core
For November, Existing addresses and new addresses can be marked as households. Households can have one or more members. Unlike shared addresses, households are identified with a unique Household ID. Schools can designate a contact for each household. This enables schools to rely on household addresses for communication purposes. We also recommend entering a salutation for the household ("Smith Family," or "Smiths," etc.) for use with mail merges.

In addition, we made a few security updates. If a user has not logged in for a while, the account is considered inactive and will be disabled for security reasons. For example, if a “legacy” user does not sign into Education Management for 365 days, their account will be disabled/locked. If a user is re-enabled/unlocked and their “legacy” password expired during their 365 days of inactivity, the user will be prompted to reset their password the first time they sign in after their account is re-enabled.

Also released this month:

• When a user goes to their inbox messages, names now appear with preferred name (if that’s not available, then first name instead) followed by grad year.
• The Emergency Banner no longer displays over part of the page. Instead, the banner now appears above the page content.

Enrollment management
This month for EMS, the team enabled enrollment managers to have an option for Contract downloads from Admissions setup, then Files and Forms. Contract downloads will not display for users who have access to the page but do not have the ReEnrollment manager role.

Also this month:

• The character limit on Fee Names is now set to 100.

School Website
This month for SWS, administrators were able to view which roles notifications are enabled for if they're hard coded. In addition, we've added the new Resource Board Editor role which can be assigned by admins to users.

Tuition and Financial Aid Management
The Tuition and Financial Aid teams made a number of updates this month. A pop-up to LUCA was added, letting users know that the Tuition Management site URL was changed from school.smarttuition.com to tuition.blackbaud.school.

Also this month:

• We have rebranded the Aging and Delinquency reports with the Blackbaud Tuition Management branding.
• We have rebranded the Enrollment by Grade report to reflect the updated Blackbaud Tuition Management rebranding.

If you want the full and complete details of everything we’ve added to the Education management products in November, 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 the release recap for the month of November. As we head into the holiday season and winter break for many schools, we have one more blog post in 2021 for you. Stop by next week to check out some brand new content. See you then!

Timothy Strunk

What's the testing process for new releases? New features is all fine and dandy, but Tuesday updates are starting to become a pain. I'm part of a Registrar's email group and we are at the ready with “what's broken now” email chains on Tuesday mornings. Today's (12/7/21) hit list (so far): advanced lists, transcripts, and application payments (not sure about all payments yet) are ALL down.

Angela Kunz

I am part of the same group as Timothy and I must concur that Tuesday's are becoming dreaded days. I love new features but they need to be implemented smoothly and without issues. This morning implementation that caused issues in advanced lists has made my grading procedure very difficult. As a registrar I feel a huge part of my job is to take the stress off my teachers. If the advanced list issue does not get corrected quickly I am going to have to add another thing to their very busy plate that's not fair to them.

Tracy Dodge

Agreed. Every Tuesday I read the release notes about recent fixes, and then immediately discover new issues that resulted from the release. Every Tuesday.

Chyrell Cardillo

I agree with the concerns that these other Education Management users are raising. New features are great but it is not ok that we come in on Tuesday mornings wondering what will not work right that day. I am so thankful for the user group we are all part of who are somehow able to alert us quicker than Blackbaud when there are issues. Blackbaud has addressed many of their release and support issues in the past few years but they have got to figure out how to release changes in these weekly upgrades without breaking things that are critical to the function of our schools. Thank you