The Month in Review: August 2021 Feature Releases

Derek Nichols
Derek Nichols Blackbaud Employee
Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud K-12 Education Solutions™ Blog
August has come and gone, which means for many of you, school is back in session. Before we get too far ahead of ourselves though, let’s end the summer months with one final look back at everything we added during August 2021.The dreaded phrase, “School is back in session” now rings true, putting an end to the summer months. The good news is, we’ve continued to be plenty busy in preparation for your return to the Education management products, some of which I detailed in last week’s blog. If you missed it, make sure to check it out.

In addition to new resources and help content, the development teams have also been hard at work adding new features and making quality of life improvements. So, as you’ve come to expect, here’s everything that happened with the Blackbaud Education Management products for the month of August.

Academics
As expected, it was another busy month for the Academic product teams. Teachers can now add assignments for a specific student or group of students after selecting the assignment(s) that should be assigned to a student when adding a new one. Under Publishing options, they will need to select the Edit icon next to Full Section then select Selected students. They will then see their course roster and can select students from the available list.

Once an assignment is assigned to specific students, it will appear on the Assignment Center with the number of students listed. Teachers can select this to view the students they have selected for the assignment. Teachers can add additional students by editing the assignment. Students will only see these assignments if they are assigned to them.

Teachers can now see at a glance from assignment details which students have submitted work on time, submitted work late, or have not yet submitted work. In the assignment details roster, a new blue inbox Submitted indicator reflects an on-time submission, while a yellow inbox Submitted indicator reflects a late submission. Teachers can hover their mouse directly over the new indicators to see precisely when the submission was made.

In addition:
  • Teachers can now scroll away from the assignment header when viewing assignments, allowing more room for teachers to view and evaluate student work.
  • Teachers can now view all Discussion contributions by a single student, including their original posts and replies to others, in the same panel from the updated Assignment Details page.
  • Teachers can add official notes for students from their Gradebook. In order to add an official note, they need to select the student from their roster and select Compose official notes. You can then add an official note for the student.
  • Teachers can see a small Uncommitted evaluations notification for assignments in the Assignment center and section assignments for a course.
  • Teachers can now use a wider variety of languages in the rich text editor for assignment, skill, and rubric comments, including 110 languages currently supported in Google Translate.
  • Teachers can make copies of Assignments, Assessments, and Discussions. From the Assignment center or Assignments tab in their course, they can use the context menu for an assignment to select Make a copy. This will create a duplicate version of the assignment with Copy of added to the assignment title and the Publish status set to No. Teachers can edit the assignment as needed before publishing.
  • The Manage enrollment feature is being replaced by the new Edit student enrollment feature. The old Manage enrollment workflow is still available until the end of October 2021.
  • Teachers can sort the Cumulative grade columns in their Gradebook.
  • Grading Managers can set up a transcript template to display a student's diploma information, including Diploma, Conferred On Date, Major, Minor, and Concentration.
  • Academic deans can enter awards for a single student or multiple students via the Manage awards page.
  • Academic deans can edit the Date conferred and Comment on student awards via the Manage awards page.
Core
The Years & terms page has been reorganized to fit more information on a single screen and improve ease of use. All previous functionality remains, but some workflows will look slightly different now. For a look at the page, go to Settings, select School information, and open the Years & terms tab. We’ll have more on this change in a future blog so stay tuned. For now, make sure to check out our documentation.

Keep in mind that on October 5, 2021, dashboards for Analysis (SKY Reporting) will no longer appear within the “ON” app under Core, Academics, etc. Instead, you’ll use the Analysis option in the solutions menu and it’ll take you to the Education Area. The solutions menu appears in the top left corner (three, parallel, horizontal lines) and is where you would select to access Core, Academics, etc.

To prepare for this change, ensure users have security group rights and roles to access the Education Area and that they log in with Blackbaud ID. For details, review this article.

Also released this month:
  • When a user goes to a Contact card on a Core user profile and edits an address, the changes are automatically subjected to validation. This ensures cleaner and more complete data entry.
  • When viewing the Handle Profile changes page, you can now get to a user's profile by selecting their name.
  • When you edit relationships on a Core user profile, you you’ll notice that it’s easier to view and enter notes and comments. The full information appears by default; you no longer click to expand the view.
Enrollment management
This month for EMS, the team made a couple of form related changes. First, the Relationship to Applicant field on an Inquiry Form now has a Parent option. In addition, the parent relationship selection now processes from the application and inquiry forms.

School website
School website added a big accessibility related update this month by making the Previous and Next buttons on image carousels easier to see and identify.

Billing management and Financial Aid
In August for Billing management, we made it so Billing clerks can now add deposit references to track, organize, and reconcile payments effectively. This means adding deposits individually via respective payment records or in bulk on the Recent payments list as well as viewing deposit references from the Deposits column in the Recent payments, Transactions list, and Work with transactions list.

The addition of deposits extends to Post to GL when defining posting rules; Billing clerks can add Deposits as a Payment segment to show the deposit number for applicable payments.

For Financial aid, we added a Remaining budget column to the budget list. With this, users can easily identify the remaining amount for each budget so they can see which budget row is showing an error when editing an awarded amount.

If you want the full and complete details of everything we’ve added to the Education management products in August, 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 all for this review. We’ll see you right back here next time. See you then!

Comments

  • Tina Pappas
    Tina Pappas
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    Thrilled that we can now add assignments to specific students. Thank you so much for adding this feature!

  • Vicky Lopuchowycz
    Vicky Lopuchowycz
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 February 2026 Monthly Challenge bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    Yes! Our teachers were so happy to see that feature as well!

  • Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    Thanks for this good August review, @Derek Nichols. In preparing for the change of Analysis (SKY Reporting) no longer appearing within the ON app, I’ve come across a problem that I’m hoping you can help me fix. From Enrollment Management > Admissions > Analyze > Capacity Planning, I can click on a number in the table, and it opens a fly-out window to show the candidate records that make up that total, and the Candidate Summary column of each row of that fly-out provides the ability to open the candidate record right there which we use frequently.

    However, the new Analysis item on the solutions menu does NOT provide this functionality. If I open the same capacity planning report there, I still have the option to click on a number in the table to open a fly-out window, but the Candidate Summary column of each row no longer contains a hyperlink to open the candidate record. This functionality appears to be lost.

    The goal of a smooth transition of moving the SKY lists would be to provide parity in the functionality, and the example above seems to be one area where we lose functionality in the move.

    Do you know if this can be fixed before they make the move or who else I need to talk to in order to explore this observation before it becomes a problem for users?

    Thanks!

  • Derek Nichols
    Derek Nichols Blackbaud Employee
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    Hey Geoffrey, thanks for reaching out. I'll definitely make sure this is passed along to the correct team, but in the mean time, I'd also highly recommend opening up a support case as well so it goes through the proper channels and gets visibility.

  • Nancy Kierstead
    Nancy Kierstead
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    We also need this functionality back. Used it daily @Derek Nichols !

  • Bryna Gleich
    Bryna Gleich Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    In the flyout list, select "Create List" and that will open a list view within the app where the names in the Summary column can be clicked to open user profiles.

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