Blackbaud’s Education Management Solutions: What’s New For August 29, 2023

Denise Kadilak
Denise Kadilak Blackbaud Employee
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Participant Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Higher Education Solutions™ Announcements
Here are the latest changes, updates, and new features for the Education management products for August 29, 2023.

Architectural updates in Education Management

In keeping with our Policy, we've upgraded one of the 3rd party components utilized by Education Management to the latest version, which includes all the latest performance and security updates available from the third-party vendor. End users should see no impact to their existing workflows, but if you notice a feature is not behaving as intended, please reach out to Support.

Learning resources

IPEDS Webinar

Please join Product Management on Wednesday, August 30 at 2:00pm ET for a webinar covering the new education lists for IPEDS reporting. Register online. A recording will also be available afterwards.

Academics

Pronouns on group rosters

On group pages, the Roster tab now displays constituent Pronouns. Previously, users had to open a constituent’s profile from the roster to view their pronouns.

This update surfaces pronouns in an additional area, but it does not modify a user’s ability to view pronouns, which is determined by your school’s Profile Access settings. You can review these settings, including View/edit profile fields, Profile publish access, and Profile relationship access, in Core > Security > Profile Access.

Additionally, this change affects rosters for classes, activities, advisories, and community groups. Pronouns will be surfaced on rosters for dorm groups and athletic teams in the future.

Billing management

Auto-Pay access added to Payment plans page

Payers can now sign up for and manage Auto-Pay from the Payment plans page in the Payer Portal, providing payers convenient access to the existing functionality found through the Current bill.

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Core

See more in roles & tasks

When a platform manager views the list of security roles (Core, Security, Roles), the grid now includes options to See more when a cell contains a large amount of information. Select it to expand the cell. Select See less to reduce the cell to its normal size.

View user’s affinity

Users with rights to view and manage a user’s affinity categories will notice a new Affinity tile now appears on the user’s Core profile, on the Access tab. This will eventually replace the Affinity Categories button which currently appears on the same tab. In a future release, users will be able to edit affinities from this new tile via an updated user interface.

As part of this update, we disabled the security task for User affinity categories (ID 529, People domain, under My profile) for the All school role. We also enabled this task for Platform manager and Billing clerk roles (including clones), because they already have access to parts of the Core user profile that aren’t Contact card data. This ensures that any roles which already had access to edit affinity categories remain unchanged and retain access to the affinity task. This update increases security for the affinity categories and helps align it with our architecture updates.

Enrollment management

Official Notes

When working with Official Notes, we've updated the formatting for the Candidate Outstanding Items to display as a bulleted list rather than a paragraph.

School Forms

The Pronouns field has been added to (and is now processed from) the User Profile, Household Profile, User Children, User Sibling, and User Grandparent blocks. The Gender field has been added to the User Profile and Household Profile blocks.

Extracurricular

Publish game and practice schedules from Manage teams

Athletic Group Managers can now publish a team’s game and practice schedules from Manage teams in Extracurricular. Previously, a team’s schedules could only be published from the team’s group page.
  1. In Extracurricular, select Athletics > Athletics setup.
  2. In Manage teams, select a team name, then select the Schedule tab.
  3. Select Publish schedules.
  4. Under Practices, select Publish practices. If you want to send a notification that the team’s practice schedule is published, select Send notification.
  5. Under Games, select . If youPublish games want to send a notification that the team’s game schedule is published, select Send notification.
  6. Select Save.

API and Integrations

Post medications to student records

We’ve added a new endpoint that allows for adding medications to a student record.

POST Medical medications create enables adding a new medication entry to the student record that matches the provided user_id.

An example of the POST request:

{ 

  "user_id": 456123789,
"medication_type": "Insulin",

"date_as_of": "2023-01-01T00:00:00Z", 

  "date_until": "2023-06-01T00:00:00Z",

  "location": "School Nurse's Office",

  "dosage": "10 units",
"dispense": {

"times_a_day": 1,

"frequency": "specific days",

"days": { 

      "sunday": false,

      "monday": true,

      "tuesday": true,

      "wednesday": true,

      "thursday": true,

      "friday": true,

      "saturday": false
}

},

"conditions": [

1,

2

],

"allergies": [

1,

2

], 

  "notes": "",
"role_access": [

{

"role_id": 1,

"has_access": true

},

{

"role_id": 2,

"has_access": false

}

]

}



Authorization requires a user with the Nurse role.

School API and OneRoster API

For information about recently added endpoints and other updates, view the School API and OneRoster API changelog.

Subscribe to “What’s New”

To receive email notifications when the What’s new update appears, make sure to subscribe to the Higher education community’s blog by logging into the community site and selecting the Subscribe button.

To manage your community subscriptions:
  1. Log into the community and locate your name and profile picture in the upper right corner.
  2. Select the drop-down arrow and select My Account.
  3. From the My Account page, select the Subscriptions tab and scroll down to the Blogs section.
  4. Locate Blackbaud Higher Education solutions Blog. If you want to be notified as soon as the What’s new content goes live on the community, select the Instant option. You can also opt for Daily and Weekly notifications.
  5. Scroll to the end of the page and select Save changes.

What’s Recent

Missed any of our weekly releases? You can catch up on everything in our Month in Review blog posts, which cover every feature and update Education management releases each month.

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