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 degree 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.
• Faculty members can now take attendance via seating charts in Faculty view. In order to use this feature, faculty members will have to create and save seating charts for their classes.
• When viewing an assignment type in a student’s gradebook, teachers can select to view or hide the Class average for the assignment type.
• Faculty 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.
• Faculty can now see the Student preview of an assignment from the Assignment details page using See student preview.
• Faculty can select if they would like to receive notifications when a student shares a Google Drive file for an assignment.
• The Grade plan groups page has a new and improved layout. To see it, go to Grades, Grading setup, then Grade plan groups.
• 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.
• The Degree page in Grading setup is now full-screen width, so it will adapt to the width of your browser window automatically. The list of existing degrees will now display up to 15 rows before creating a second page of results

Core
For November, the Core team made Existing addresses and new addresses able to 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.

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.

Billing management
For November, BBBM updated the Current bill when payers are viewing it. Now, they’ll see an indicator beside the amount due detailing past due charge amounts and their respective due dates.

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!