The Month in Review: March 2021 Feature Releases

Derek Nichols

Spring has sprung! Before we get too far into April, let’s take one last look back at everything that arrived and changed for the Education management products in March 2021.With March out of the way, we’re heading full steam into the warmer weather as well as the sights and sounds of Spring. As the old saying goes, April showers bring a whole pile of flowers in May. Okay, that may not be exactly it, but you get the point.

Similar to the rapidly expanding growth of flowers, the month of March also saw plenty of updates and additions sprout inside of the Blackbaud Education management products. So, before we delve further into April, let’s recap everything that happened during March 2021. Enjoy!

Academics
It was a very busy month for the Academics product! One of the biggest updates this month were the improvements made to the Cumulative GPAs for transcripts. In addition to the previously existing Cumulative GPA calculation, you can now set up transcripts to display Cumulative GPAs as of the end of past academic terms or years. Now you can generate a transcript that displays a student’s cumulative GPA as of the end of each of their previous academic years or terms, as well as their current cumulative GPA. Thankfully, the process for setting up grade calculations has not changed, and the final cumulative GPA grade will be calculated the same way as before. For more on these changes, make sure to check out our online help.

We have made some updates to import assignments to make sure that all teachers across all schools can import assignments. Previously, if a school did not use Grade book, teachers could not bulk import assignments. If your school does not use Grade book, your teachers will no longer be required to use a Marking period filter when searching for assignments to import or sections to import to. If your school does not use Marking periods, the set assigned, and due dates will need to fall within the selected School year. The School year dates will be available on step three of the import assignments modal.

Also released this month:

• As a scheduling manager, saving changes in the Manage classes modal will now save changes for all sections of the class.
• To improve legibility, academic year headings on transcripts will now display GPAs and rankings on separate lines with line wrapping if needed. The academic year heading can still display up to two GPAs and a rank.
• To prevent teachers from selecting the Save button again during an assignment import, we’ve disabled it one it has been selected.
• When you select Run on the Course Enrollments report, the Section dropdown menu no longer displays Offerings.
• We overhauled the algorithm for Generate Student Schedule so that the process runs more quickly in complex scheduling scenarios and generates a higher number of successful enrollments.
• When teachers import assignments, they can now view the assignment Description and search the list of available assignments using keywords.
• When you select Run on the Course Enrollments report, the Section dropdown menu no longer displays Offerings.
• The Generate Student Schedule results page will now display section information based on the most recent time your school ran Generate Student Schedule.
• A new warning message will display when a Scheduling Manager tries to add a student to a second section of the same course. The Scheduling Manager will then have the option to either transfer the student to the new section or enroll the student in multiple sections.

Core
One of the biggest updates to the Education management products this month was for Inbox Messages. Not only were a number of highly requested features added in such as a more robust rich text editor, but the entire experience was overhauled for easier and better use. Seriously, there’s a ton to this update so make sure to visit the documentation to see everything new as well as a recent blog post outlining all of the cool, new stuff.

Users who don’t use Blackbaud ID log in with a “legacy” username and password instead. When these “legacy” passwords are changed, the user receives an email notification which informs them of the change and relevant instructions as to what to do. To customize the email notification, a communication manager or platform manager should go to Core, Communications, Notifications, Notifications, and select the Password Updated template from the User Management category.

In addition, Core also released:

• Preferred names now appear in the Relationships tile on user profiles in Core. A user’s preferred name may differ from their legal first name.
• When users who have the platform manager and the On API access manager role view their Home dashboards in Core, they’ll see additional information on the Blackbaud ID details tile and can use the new links to quickly access the actions they need to take (such as to transition to using authentication tokens by June 30, 2021).
• In recent months, we’ve added several templates for data imports, made additional updates for existing imports, and increased auditing. Check out the documentation for more!

Enrollment management
It was another big month for the EMS team, creating a number of quality-of-life changes and requested features.

For many, the biggest one allows schools to automatically enroll incoming students for a selected grade level when a new academic year begins. Under Core, Settings, School information, and then School, a new option can be enabled to automate the process. With this setting enabled, incoming students at the selected grade level will automatically become Students when a Registrar changes the current Academic Year. For example, changing the current academic year from 2020-2021 to 2021-2022 would trigger automatic enrollment for incoming students in this grade level.

For school forms, Reminder Options for school form managers now have more choices including options like 1 Month before due, 3 weeks before due, 2 weeks before due, and 2 weeks after due date. In addition, school forms managers can now remove all recipients in bulk.

Also this month:

• Exported School forms now include the User regarding first name and last name columns.
• After enabling archiving inquiry forms last month, we've expanded the functionality to include archiving school forms as well from the Application settings.
• Enrollment managers now have access to a School Decision Publish Date/Time column and filter.
• The Applying for financial aid column no longer displays for users who do not have access turned on.
• A candidate's decision checklist step on a Committee Review now prefills with whatever value the Decision Type step is set to. If there are multiple steps with a decision type listed, the system defaults to the first one in the list.
• Re/enrollment managers now have a setting on contracts that auto-enrolls candidates when processed.
• For users with cloned roles, they'll no longer see the Applying for Financial Aid question on the Candidate Record unless the specific task has been turned on.
• Admissions managers now only receive submitted Inquiry forms that have passed a reCAPTCHA test.
• Medical forms can now be exported by medical form managers. Please note that this is restricted for those who are not impersonating roles such as Nurses.
• When a candidate and student are merged, if the student's next enrolling year is in the future when compared to the candidate's entering year, the candidate is marked as a Student reapply.
• Admissions managers now have a gender filter and column available to use on the Manage student checklist and Process student checklist steps lists.

Billing management
For Billing management in March, a new alert was added to notify Billing clerks that they must have Payment plans prepared before credits generate. Credits then automatically generate once a payment plan is added.

The alert itself appears in two locations. The first, when adding Financial aid or an Enrollment deposit, if Based on student's payment plan is selected under Disbursement dates. The second, Under Financial aid or Enrollment deposit on a Billing profile.
Additional Billing management updates include:

• Add payment plans to group is a new option available to Billing clerks under Tasks on the Billing management Overview. This option lets Payment plans be added to students in bulk if they match filterable criteria, are a part of an existing list, or are included in a .csv file.
• Students and payers can now view and manage specific Notification settings from their profile including Past due, Online payment made, and Upcoming payment due.
• Now, payers will enjoy a greater degree of clarity when assessing the specifics impacting their Payment plans.

If you want the full and complete details of everything we’ve added to the Education management products in March, 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 it for this week, but thanks for joining me and reading this far. We’ve got a lot more planned for April so stay tuned! As always, make sure to tune back in here next week as we’ll have another brand new topic for you. See you then!