Opinions Wanted: We Want To Hear From You!

Derek Nichols

The goal of the community is to be a discussion point and a way to communicate with your fellow users. Considering the blog is typically me talking to you, let's try something a bit different this week, shall we?The community blog is just another way in which we can directly communicate with one another about various topics. Whether that’s to keep you informed of new events and content, offer tips and tricks, or perhaps a guide on how to use one of our features, these blogs are here to serve as a discussion and jumping off point. My goal with these posts is to provide knowledge and assistance to better improve your time with the Blackbaud Education management products.

With that idea in mind, I wanted to use this week’s post to try something a little different. I want to hear from you and your opinions on what sort of topics and subjects matter to you. Down the road, what would you potentially like to see in this space?

Naturally, we cover a wide variety of topics from week to week so any thought or opinion regarding the Education management products is welcome. Is there something that is giving you trouble? Anything you want to know more about? Is there some trick you’ve discovered that you think would be a cool thing for other people to know? Share it! This is your time to be heard.

Of course, I need to add a disclaimer to all of this. Keep in mind that this isn’t an official survey, it won’t impact product development at all (it’s for knowledge purposes), and I can't guarantee that any opinions offered will ever eventually become a future blog post. At the very least, the data you provide here will help us on the Strategic Content and Development team further improve our help content and deliverables to you.


Now, if you don’t want to discuss your opinions here, that's totally fine as well. No pressure. Instead, I’d recommend visiting the Ideas area in the community to add your thoughts. Not sure how it works? Let me help guide you right here.

Thanks for stopping by this week and helping to make your voice heard. Next week, we’re charging head long into our May blogs which is led by our April release recap. We’ve got a lot of good stuff planned over the next four weeks, so make sure to stay tuned! See you all then!

Morgan Kunze

Thanks, Derek - what a great idea and a wonderful opportunity for us to provide input and to learn what others are wondering about/chewing on/struggling with/enjoying.

My school (Northwest Academy in Portland, OR; grades 6-12) is experimenting with CBE this year. After three quarters, we've learned a lot … but there are still a lot of questions! I'd be interested to know how/whether other schools are using mastery grading; how they determined their calculations and whether they feel they chose wisely (we're rethinking our decaying average, but now it's difficult to change it!); whether different divisions (upper, middle, lower school) or different disciplines (arts, science, et al) are using it differently; and more!

It would be fantastic to hear from teaching faculty as well as database administrators, and of course I'd be avid to hear from Blackbaud re: how this module might be changing or growing now that it's been around for a year.

In terms of offering my own opinion, here's our biggie from CBE: mastery progression should be viewable based on the parent-level skill (or even an entire category) in addition to the sub-skills. When we saw this module debut, I assumed that the progression through the sub-skills would add up to a sort of “super picture” of a student's progression through the higher-level skill or category - wouldn't that be cool? As far as we can tell, that's not how it works at this time - but it would be a fantastic evolution of the tool.

Thanks for asking! So grateful to be part of this community of engaged users and learners.

Derek Nichols

Hey Morgan, Thanks for the detailed response, this is wonderful. CBE is definitely a hot topic, so I'll certainly keep this in mind and pass along your thoughts to the Academics team as well. Obviously, I can't really speak to how other schools are using it, but hopefully other people can follow up with thoughts as well.

Karen Diener

There have been a lot of great customer success / adoption webinars on the RE side. I would LOVE to see something about to setting up and managing integration between Education Solutions and RENXT.

I have clients who are interested in this but they really don't understand how it works and what changes they'll need to consider. If there was a webinar (or two, because I think this should be a multi-part series) I think it would make a very big difference to a lot of smaller schools.

Karen

Derek Nichols

Thanks for the comment, Karen! Definitely understand where you're coming from with this. I'll make sure to mention this to the appropriate individuals. No promises or anything like that, but hopefully we can do something along these lines.