What's New - May 7, 2024

Join product manager, Jessi Walters, for an overview of new fields, integration mapping, and the time-saving logical calculation performed in new Education List columns. Learn tips for optimizing your setting and how to select the right date to include in your reports for the National Student Loan Data System and the National Student Clearinghouse. Register for the webinar for Tuesday May 14 at 2:00 p.m. eastern daylight time.

We recently launched a new Journal help feature, highlighting new features, best practices, and everything else related to Blackbaud's Education Management products. This week's Journal entry discusses our Monthly Release recap feature and where you can find it inside of the help center. You can find new Journal entries within our Online Help Center right here, but we'll be sure to keep you updated with our latest post each week as well.

This update will now be releasing in waves between 05/07-05/21, this is one week later than the originally announced timeline. In the meantime, to help get your faculty prepared for this update, we’ve created a short video outlining the new features linked below.

A couple of enhancements to look forward to when this update is made available to your school:

• Student names will display per User Name Format settings, allowing preferred names to display more prominently.

• Take attendance from a seating chart view.

• Enable teachers who prefer a checklist-type workflow by not having your schools equivalent of Present automatically defaulting for each student. Though, when the modal is saved, students who do not have an attendance code listed will automatically be assigned the Present equivalent.

Grading managers can now select multiple grade plan grades when configuring Quality Points from Academics, Grades, Grading setup, Calculations. Select Edit to see a new option called Grade plan grade(s) to use to allow selection of all available Grade Plan Grades. This change should provide added flexibility for institutions with more complex setups including multiple different programs or school levels.

Platform Managers can now enable a new end of term grade entry experience for faculty in Core, Settings, Activate new features. Resources, including help documentation and a Getting started video, are available in the feature tile. The old experience will remain available until fall of 2024 when the new experience will be activated and required for all institutions.

Grade translation review

Before enabling the new end of term grade entry experience, Grading managers should review their school's Grade translations in Academics, Grades, Grading setup. To include all grade values in grade calculations, the number of decimal places used for the Maximum values in Grade translations should match the number of decimal places your school uses when calculating grades. Using 5 decimal places ensures that all grade values are included in grade calculations, regardless of the selected decimal precision.

Show previous grades

When entering grades, faculty can now select Show previous grades to easily view previously recorded grade plan grades in the grade entry grid. With this change, faculty no longer need to run lists or reports to view student progress throughout the year.

Narrative view

New narrative grade entry view designed with long-form comment entry in mind. Comments are now auto-saved and faculty have more data points available as they compose their grade comments.

Additional enhancements include:

• Bulk comment entry allows faculty to specify which students a bulk comment applies to, and a comment icon indicates which students already have comments present.

• Auto-save for all comment entry.

• Simplified calculation setup wizard for faculty.

• The New grading tab is available on all group types, including Athletics.

Map Assessment skills to Mastery skills

The new grade entry experience also includes a major enhancement for schools utilizing Mastery skills. Schools can now map Assessment skills to Mastery skill equivalents so that Mastery skill information can be included on report cards and transcripts without having to manually re-enter the information under Assessment skills.

Grading managers map Assessment skills to Mastery skill equivalents in Academics, Grades, Grading setup, New assessment skills. Data managers can also import Assessment skills and link them to Mastery skills with the new Assessment skills import. For more details, see Assessment skills.

• An Assessment skill can only be mapped to one Mastery skill and a Mastery skill can only be mapped to one Assessment skill.

• An Assessment skill can be mapped to either a Transferable skill or sub-skill or a Content-are skill or sub-skill, but not both.

• Parent Mastery skills mapped to an Assessment skill will use an average of the sub-skills under the parent skill.

Once skills are mapped, faculty can select Calculate for those skills in New grading to pull Mastery skill ratings from their gradebook into Assessment skills as marking period averages or year-to-date averages. Calculate is only available for Assessment skills that are mapped to Mastery skills.

The Distribution list now features sortable columns to organize results and a set of default filters to expedite the list’s loading time.

By default, the initial filter applied when you load the list is the Post date for the current month, and results are sorted by transaction ID. Select a column header to sort the list based on the selected category.

The Open items report now features a search field that enables Billing clerks to filter records based on matched results amongst all open items. For example, a Billing clerk could enter a student’s name to find all open items associated with that record.

We’ve added a new billing year filter when calculating balances on the Open items report. With the filter applied, the calculated balances will only include transactions applied "as of" the selected date and within the selected billing year.

When a platform manager, with the Impersonate User task enabled, chooses to impersonate another user, a blue “banner” appears across the top of the user interface. This reminds the manager that they are acting as someone else, highlights the navigational areas which “belong” to the impersonated user versus to themselves, and makes it easier to stop impersonating.

Tip: Need to take a screenshot or record a video? When you select an area to capture with your recording tool, select the area below the banner or crop the banner out when you edit.

The migration for Blackbaud ID (BBID) for education solutions will occur this Wednesday, May 8.

This update improves the reliability of Blackbaud ID, while also creating an easier, more intuitive sign-in page that puts your brand at the center of the user experience.

• Users who land on the Blackbaud ID sign in page will see an improved look, which places your school’s organization’s logo more prominently and centrally on the page.

• Users who sign in with a Blackbaud ID email and password, who also have multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled via Blackbaud ID, will be prompted to recreate a new MFA connection. The options and steps to set up MFA remain unchanged. See our BBID MFA documentation for additional details.

• Users who log in with a “social sign-in,” such as Sign in with Google or Sign in with Apple, will be prompted to reauthorize Blackbaud to access their name and email. (Google and Apple manage the sign-in steps between the Blackbaud ID sign in page and the point when the user lands in Education Management again.)

• Those who log in via single sign-on (SSO) are unaffected - their login workflow will not change. SSO admins will need to create a new SSO connection with Blackbaud between May and October; additional details will be shared when the new setup is available.

Tip: Although this update was originally scheduled for April, it was temporarily delayed to ensure an optimal experience for users of Blackbaud's education solutions. May 8th was carefully chosen to avoid a common tuition payment day, to allow other significant product enhancements to release on Tuesday, to minimize disruption to the end-of-year season, and to provide you with at least a full business day of notice. The new Blackbaud ID experience will be enabled during business hours on Wednesday morning to ensure our award-winning support team is available for you. Users who are already logged in will not be interrupted by the release; they will simply see the new Blackbaud ID experience the next time they log in again.

Looking for more information?

• View the Blackbaud ID documentation.

• Follow the Higher Ed user community blog.

Last week’s release included enhancements to how users select and adjust photos for their 360 user profiles. Now, those adjusted images appear in 360 profile headers, People Finder (Core and Academics), Affinity membership, messaging, and Find me now.

Remember to configure access settings for Preferred last name. To do so, a platform manager should go to Core, Security, Profile access. We recently enabled organizations to control access to this field. Soon, Preferred last name will appear on Contact cards. Be sure to configure the access settings for the field so you’re prepared when it is released in May.

This benefits individuals who use a last name for social settings that differs from their legal last name. For example, users with long or hyphenated names may socially use a shorter, unhyphenated name. Likewise, faculty who marry after earning a PhD may prefer to use the name from their professional degree instead of their marriage certificate.

When using the Form submissions list, admissions managers will now see the current school name as a column. This should make things easier as the Form submissions list will no longer display a number when a registrant adds a name for a school that's currently not on the list.