Name: Product Update Briefing - Higher Education Solutions
Uploaded: 2026-05-06T19:00:55.378Z
Duration: 1 h 12 min 8 s
Description: Product Update Briefing - Higher Education Solutions

Transcript for "Product Update Briefing - Higher Education Solutions": Alright. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the May 2026 product update briefing for Blackbaud Education Management. And before I get started, I just wanna quickly say a few things. And that is, if you are a k 12 school and you're attending this session, I just wanna make sure you understand that that most of this content, if not all of the content, will be focused on higher education. And so we do have a recording of the k twelve specific pubs, that we can send you the link. So if you're attending and you might wanna drop off, we can get you the link later. But, again, welcome. I'm really glad that you're here regardless, And whether you're a customer running our admissions office or a faculty running a class or maybe juggling grading or an administrator of one of our solutions, thanks for giving us your time. I know and we know that your time is one of the most precious things that you have, and we don't take that lightly. So I'm Ryan Baus. I've actually been at Blackbaud for about a hundred fifty days now, but I've been in education, software ed tech for eighteen years. I was founder of a product company called School BI, a data warehouse for education organizations, and we were acquired in November. And now I'm part of the education product team, and I'm gonna be emceeing the event today. And one of the things I like to tell, a quick story is that while my background is diverse through educational software, there's one tenant that runs through those experience. I obsess, about building software that helps educational organizations run more effectively and reach their goals, not just because of efficiency's sake, but because these communities, are so focused on their mission, which we all know is to change students' lives, and there's nothing more rewarding than actually helping organizations do that. On a personal note, I'm a little league coach of two boys, which is quite the experience. I serve on several educational organization boards, and my family and I call San Francisco Bay Area home. And, one of the things that I wanted to do before we get into kind of the meat of the, the discussion today was just a couple of housekeeping items. The audio is through your speakers, and if you run into any on your computer and if you run into any issues, just usually a quick refresh of the browser does the trick, it might log you back in. If you have any issues, you'll get the recording by email after, and of course, you can download the slides from the doc tab within this session. You can use the Q and A panel to ask questions. Our team of product folks and, product marketing folks are online to actually answer questions in real time. Keep them coming. If we don't get to them, know that we'll probably follow, up with some answers if possible. There's usually a cogwheel up in the right hand corner, that you can actually look at some of your settings if you're having trouble with auto audio or any of the things I mentioned. So let's talk a little bit about what we're gonna cover today. You can see the lineup. We're gonna be talking about new features and functioning around our core technology, our student information and learning management, our school websites and communications, our APIs and integration, things around enrollment management, and our billing management. And I wanna just say one quick thing here is that we could just list out all the product features that we're going to be building, but every single one of these product areas represents a moment in a student's journey with your school. That student could be discovering your school, they apply, they get accepted, they sign a contract, They're assigned to a class. Then they join activities. The student shows up on the first day and begins their journey with you as, like, a, you know, higher education partner. You then might communicate with that student for years. Right? Maybe three, four, five years depending on your program, six. And that, hopefully, if we do this all right with you, that student becomes an alum, and they eventually become an active giving community member of that, of your postgraduate kind of experience. And so we're in this together. What you're gonna see today isn't just a list of features. It's how we're making every one of those amendments I just mentioned a little bit better to enable you to be a little bit more connected and to try to bring less pain into your office of the folks that are doing the work. Now one of the things if you're new to Blackbaud, you might not have ever seen this slide before. If you've been a Blackbaud user before, you've maybe seen this slide before. So for our higher ed partners, this is the ecosystem that we view things. Right? We do development advancement, LMS, SIS, enrollment management, donor and prospect research. We do financial management and all things around different scholarship management. And we provide an API that allows for, third party partners to build out different applications on top of our solution. And I know this probably is looks like a product diagram, a little bit marketing focused, but, really, it represents our promise to you as a higher ed organization to try to stitch together these different technologies so that you have a holistic approach. And we believe that you deserve a very highly connected, highly interoperable experience that data can flow back and forth through this ecosystem seamlessly. And I always like to tie things to outcomes. This is a really important part of what we do at Blackbaud. So for higher ed, we're we know you're the the folks in the room, you're not a massive university that has a huge research division or that you have a massive army of IT people. You know, you're purpose driven. You're institutions that need ERPs that fit your scope and your budget, and, this one is designed for folks like you. So everything you see around our kind of, outcomes, the fact that we're helping you communicate meaningful per performance of your students and your university or your college, and we wanna help you attract and retain students that are the right fit for your mission. Also, with the lens of financial sustainability, how does this all play into your model, your your your fiscal model? And I can assure you that these are not marketing buzzwords that we just put on a slide and, you know, show you once every six months. These are things that, we hold dear, and we build all of our products through these lenses. So it's with great pride that I say that those are the outcomes we focused on. Now the other thing that the folks in the Blackbaud team wanted me to mention is that there are other pubs that happen during this time of year. So while we'll be focused on the things I mentioned at the top, there are other pubs that you might wanna take a look at. We have pubs around Raiser's Edge, NXT. We have pubs, around Financial Edge, which I think is still I'm looking at the date, which is tomorrow. So you should really strongly consider checking those out or at least viewing the slides and the recordings after. I think that they're great learning opportunities and we internally actually participate in listening to those as well. The last thing I want to do before I hand it over to the product team is to really talk about some of the big areas that are happening around AI. And it's on everyone's mind. It's incredibly exciting times in this industry, but there's also some uncertainty. And we at Blackbaud wanna be true partners with you to make sure that we, you you know, build products that have the most value, that keep secure and confidential data, just that. So this isn't hype for us. We really do believe building an AI strategy around this idea of building it responsibly with intentionality is really the important part. So what I wanna do is actually kinda describe how Blackbaud is viewing the AI effort both internally and externally. So we have this slide, which is a great way to to kinda describe the the the the continuum or the the the spectrum of, AI led initiatives within Blackbaud. The best way to explain it from you know, the best way I've found to explain it and hopefully it works for you all is that, you know, we have things on one end which are more integrated into what we call I'm gonna use the exact word here because I wanna make sure I read the slide. Kind of this concept of enriching workflows, which are, you know, AI enabled features that surface, maybe data points or insights that you, as a human, would look at and make a decision on, but you're still, you know, running a workflow. And a good example of that is if you're familiar with our, our e product or Raiser's Edge product, there's something called prospect insight. So, you know, does the family or a person have capacity to give? And there's a measurement and it says yes, no, maybe. And then the development office does something with that. You know, as you move to the right, we're kind of getting less human led, not significantly, but think of it like a content generator. So, a chat for Blackbaud product that allows you to generate content quickly is another example. And as you continue to the right, going more autonomous, more AI led, think of, you know, intelligence assistance. Collections assistant is a really good example. So if you, have a process where you might have, some processes or workflows that AI is driving to do automated emails and reminders and text messages and, you know, things like that or banners or things in the kind of collection process that's continuing more to the right of a fully agentic experience. And then there are you know, we do have strategic plans to actually, release what we're calling autonomous, you know, agents, and the best example of that is a development. Think of that agent as a team member. They don't do anything just out of the box. You have to train them, and over time, they get better at their job just like anybody on your staff. But, eventually, they may come to a point where that autonomous agent, in this case, in our product feature set, we have something called the development agent, which if you work with them, train them, teach them, tell them what they did right and wrong, over time, they might be running an email campaign, responding to emails directly. They could, work kick off a workflow, raise a concern to you, and you get to decide how much a human should be involved in the process or not. It could be a little or could be a lot. And so just think of the offering that we're gonna be providing is gonna span the spectrum. This I use the development world just because there's ones that fit pretty much, conveniently in there, but I just wanted to bring that up. The the goal isn't for us to, you know, say one of these AI strategies is gonna be the end all, be all. It's actually a holistic approach to help schools figure out how to go from a system of record to a system of action, and that's really what it's about for us. Now for a lot of folks, it's important to understand, you know, what does that mean in real, like, life? Like, how are we gonna do this? Well, the first thing we wanna do is make sure that we continually stress that this is about putting higher ed organizations in control. This isn't about anything going rogue or setting things up. I just have a series of slides in here for you to understand that we are always going to make this an organization that has a feature set that makes the school or organization opt in for these features. This is never going to be something that like one day you log in and there's five agents and they're just running. That's not our plan. You are controlled. AI is governed through the global opt in setting, which you'll hear more and more about as we start to release these products to market. But then ultimately, at any time, you as a school could opt into those or opt out. We're excited about this by doing it this way rather than forcing any individual one to or any individual organization to be like, you have to do this. It's the only way to do it. Now there are a bunch of resources here that I want you to check out. I'm not going to read through them, but they're incredible areas for you as an organization to actually look at if you're a systems administrator or a platform manager. So they'll be in the document for, reference later. The last thing that I always like to talk about, if you don't know about, is we have a trust center. And that trust center is an area that, a lot of our systems administrators or platform managers can find out about how we're approaching security, what we're doing, the certifications that we are part of. It's very important for us to be transparent about that because we do spend a lot of time and energy on that, and we wanna make sure that you're aware of it, that we take this, very seriously. Okay. Last two things. We're about to hand it off to the product managers. I need to say, a couple of comments about our safe harbor. We may be discussing forward looking features and statements today. And what this safe harbor statement says is that you need to make any purchasing decisions or any decisions of what software to to to do or to use, I should say, implement or use, based on what's available today. We have a great line of sight. It's something we take a lot of pride on and what features we're building, but things are moving fast. And there could be details of a feature that might be different six months from now than what way we describe it today. The big buckets will be the same, but maybe the button will be in a different place. And so you need to make buying decisions on what we have available today, and so I just need to say that. Okay. I am gonna hand it off to the product team in one second. But before I do that, I do want to let you know that you'll be hearing from Jesse, Jacqueline, Mike, Steven, and Julia today, and they are your product managers. I don't say this next statement lightly because they are exceptional. They come from your world. They're former educators, former administrators, platform managers. They didn't just study software and how to build enterprise class software for, nonprofits and education organizations. They have lived the pain that you all have lived, and they bring a perspective that, is incredible on what we build and how we build it and why it matters. And I've only been here at a hundred and fifty days ish, and some of them have been here for twenty five, and I'm continuing to learn from them. But what has really stuck with me as I learned about this, group is that they do not just clock in to ship features. They deeply care. They lose sleep over whether our grading and our report cards and our attendance work the way that we they should. They obsess over how families and students enroll into your school. So when they walk through the features today and what's coming, please know that every all of this is human centric, and there's always a story behind it. And I can't wait for you to hear from the people who have lived it. And we're gonna start with Jesse, and I'm gonna let you take it from here. Jesse, are you there? Oh, perfect. Awesome. Thanks, Ryan. Hey, everyone. My name is Jessie Walters, and I am the product manager for Core in education management. I've been with Blackbaud since 2018. And before that, I implemented education management at a k 12 school in 2015. As we go through all of our prepared content for you today, there are a few tools that you can use on each of the slides to remember where you are and to get some helpful information from each. So in the top right hand corner, there is a little sticker that's gonna show you the product area that that content covers, so which part of the product you would be able to find that enhancement. And then at the bottom of each of the slides, you'll see whether an idea originated from the idea bank and whether work is in progress or if this is something that has recently been released. Since this is our higher ed pub, the candidate and US sticker won't apply because all of you are in The United States. We will also organize our content per product starting with things that are available now or things that were released in roughly the last six months or so. And then after that, we'll follow-up with content that you'll be seeing within roughly the next six months, into the future. So first up for core and things that are available now, you may have seen the recently released list of reports. The reports themselves still largely remain in the in the, pop up window. But in this list of reports before, this was one of our older page styles that we call podium, where the page was kind of cumbersome and outdated. So now we've released a new list of reports back in December where you're able to filter, search, the page loads more quickly, and you're now able to export the list of reports as well. We've combined the daily user experience with the admin experience for easier management of the reports, and soon, you will see a description for each of those so you know what is in the report before having to open it and run that report to see the data that's there. The core team also made an update to the way that names are formatted in your directories. With this change, the names are formatted according to username format, which is set back in core, and that format is applied to the online version, the printed version, search results, and family directories so that all of those versions have the same name format. And since it's using username format, you also have any have total flexibility of which version of a name to, display. And the result is that you can hide first names, you can apply preferred names in the new preferred last name field, and ultimately respect the preferences of your community members. So now let's talk about the massive group of things that we have coming in the next six months in core. The teams have been working hard to update the lists of push page issues, jobs, templates, and distribution groups. This is a similar experience that you see here on the screen compared to the new list that was released for the list of reports where, before they or today, they are on Podium where they're kind of cumbersome to navigate, and apply filters and load all of your results. In the coming Sky UX list of all of those issues, jobs, distribution groups, and templates, you'll have the same modern filters, search, faster page loading without having to apply a filter first. You'll have all of the same functionality in the new list as you do today, plus you'll have the ability to export any of those lists. And then the teams are working on these while Steven Boyle and his team work to redesign and reimagine the way that you create any of those issues and jobs and send communications to your community. So while that work, is ongoing, we're working to just do the simplest pieces first. Related to push page, we also have a coming change to push page editor access access to similarly move it off of that older page style to Sky UX. Today, you have a list of push page editor groups. You can toggle over and look at a list of users with push page editor access, but in neither experience are you able to see the full list of people who are assigned to each of those groups. So with the coming change, you're gonna have a single consolidated experience where you can review all of your push page editors and any of the groups that are available and groups to which they are assigned to manage them from a single screen with total transparency to align with any of those groups that you need. A popular vote getter in both k 12 and higher ed is a coming change to the way that directory settings are managed. If you want to allow some roles to remove their information from the directory entirely, that prevents your professors and faculty from being able to see or contact the students with whom they interact. And so we are going to make a change so that you'll be able to set this setting per role so that you can determine who should actually be able to remove themselves from the online directories altogether and who, should not have that preference based on your policy. With that, you'll have granular control, of course, which then provides the flexibility and privacy. We are also working to update the list of basic and advanced lists. Similarly, this is also on Podium where you have a separate admin experience to go and manage who has the ability to create lists and review their lists, and then a separate page where you go and review any of the basic and advanced lists that you have created and have access to. So coming soon, we will consolidate those lists into one big list with filters so that you can find any of those lists that you need, faster searching. You'll also be able to complete some bulk actions like select multiple lists and delete them. You're also going to be able to as a a platform manager or a list admin, you'll be able to create a list and grant others access to edit or delete the list, not just view and copy or run the list. So if you have somebody who's gonna use that list year after year, they don't have to come back to you each year and ask you to update that that school year filter. They can take care of it themselves once you have applied your expertise to create the list for them. We are also working to migrate the existing basic list creation workflow to the query editor experience like you see in Razer's Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT. Today, if you create a basic list from an existing topic, anytime that you select a a field, a condition, a value in your criteria, there's a page load between each of those. And with the new experience, those are gonna be on different tabs where you select your criteria. A new capability in this list type is gonna be that you have the ability to sort your output. You can change your column headers, and you just, in general, have a much more modern and, shared experience like you see in ARIA NXT. We've been talking about the coming, support for world language characters in name fields for a long time, and that's because it takes a lot of sequential work to make this update throughout the entire system. But it is still coming. The work is still in progress. And by the end of this year, we expect that you will be able to store world language characters in name fields so that you can appropriately store someone's name regardless of which language and characters they need. With Blackbaud AI chat, admins are forever challenged to do more with less. And so coming soon via EAP, we have, Blackbaud AI Chat in education, which is like an online assistant powering smarter and faster work. With Blackbaud AI chat, you can retrieve basic user information, create and run simple lists, get help finding settings and accessing help docs or knowledge based articles just by asking a question in the chat. And then you can even do some basic data comparisons like compare access of user a to that of user b to figure out what roles and tasks might be missing between the between the two to figure out what access someone else might need. And then Jacqueline and the SIS team have been implementing even more connections under academics so that you can do things like enter an absence or an infraction regardless of where you are in the system. So if you're building an advanced list, you don't wanna have to leave that page to go and enter an absence. You'll be able to do that from the same screen without having to leave where you are. And then one of the most common requests that we hear is that people would like to be able to ask a simple question and have AI chat, generate a query or give them a list based on whatever they've put into the into the chat. And while that is something that we're working toward in the distant future, it is something that we're working on as part of what we call Project Prism and in general as a response to the statement that we hear frequently, which is that Blackbaud does a really good job of storing my data, but it's really difficult to get the data back out of the system. So we have been working, to in partnership with Databricks to move all of our data from the entire database of all of your education management solutions into a shared data lake or data warehouse so that all of the data becomes available as we work to innovate and bring you new reporting tools, and apply AI on top of it, give you the ability to use natural language to create advanced queries, build your own visual reports and dashboards like you need, and to reduce the latency or the amount of time that passes between when you make a change in the system and when it's able to show up in your reports. Our first milestone along the way as we work toward, you know, the easiest and best flavors of reporting is to replace the preconfigured dashboards that you have today under the analysis menu. The first one that we're working on now is for capacity planning, and then we will be building out parity with the rest of those preconfigured dashboards. But with these, we are rebuilding them to save cost on our end because, ultimately, we get to pass that cost along to you as well. With these, we're gonna be moving the dashboards more close to your daily workflows for easier and more intuitive access to to the data that you need, and then we'll continue building out from there. So this is not the end goal. This is just our first milestone, and we expect that EAP to be available by the end of this year. Also coming soon, the core team is working to create a list of employees for any of those who have employment information. Today, if you want to review that information in bulk, you have to go into an advanced list, and then there's no way to make updates other than going into each record and updating it manually. So soon, you'll have a list of everyone with employment detail in the list, and you'll be able to edit their employment from the list and withdraw employees in bulk, which is currently a Podium experience. And all of this together will work to make it easier to onboard and offboard folks among terms. And then the final capability I wanted to share today is one that we'll be working on called actions that work a lot like those in Raiser's Edge. Actions track and plan constituent interactions like meetings, phone calls, emails, tasks, and they're used to cultivate relationships and manage a student's experience, especially when it falls outside the typical system workflows, allowing admins to assign, prioritize, and complete tasks so nothing and no one falls through the cracks. With that, I will hand it over to Jacqueline Kocher and Mike Morissette to talk to you about the realm of academics. Thanks, Jesse. Hi, everyone. I'm Jacqueline Kosha, product manager for the student information system, and I've been with Blackbaud for just over twelve years. I'm working entirely on our education products. And then joining me today for our student information and learning management updates is Mike. Yes. Hi, everyone. Like Jacqueline mentioned, my name is Mike Morrissette. I am also one of the product managers here at Blackbaud, working predominantly on our learning management and student information systems. To start, we're gonna be taking a look at some updates that we've made to our student information system, and we'll take a look at some updates to grading specifically as well as transcripts and report cards. Now for grading, we went ahead and modernized a good number of pages over the last six months. Things like enter grades by class, grade categories, and skill based grade periods have all been moved out of an older podium based architecture and moved into a newer architecture that we call Sky. This allows us to set a really solid foundation to bring even more enhancements to you all that you have been asking for in our grading module. Additionally, we've gone through and renamed several of our settings to better align with how institutions are talking about grading. Previously, we had what we used to call standard grade plan groups and assessment grade plan groups, and those have since been changed to, again, better align with how you all are talking about these kinds of grading philosophies. For example, standard grade plan groups are now called traditional grade groups, or traditional grades as a more holistic umbrella term. Whereas if your institution is evaluating based on skills, all settings that had to do with skills prior are now labeled as skills based, such as skills based grade groups, etcetera. So we also recently released an update to our grading hub. Now the grading hub is a place where grading managers can go to manage existing grading related settings during the academic year. Now this happens, in grades, manage grades. And once you land on that page, you'll access the Hub experience. From there, you can do things like bulk actions. And we also surface helpful reminders in the event that you have to configure calculations. That can all be found in the needs attentions box. We'll also be adding in the rollover into this place. That way, you you don't have to go into core to access the rollover when you're wanting to pull Gradebook and grading information from one year to the next. That can all be managed directly from within the hub. Now I'll pass it over to Jacqueline to talk through some updates to grade reports and transcripts. Thanks, Mike. Our grade reports and transcripts have seen a number of improvements with the goal of helping more schools be able to fully adopt modern builders to achieve the reports that you need to present to your students. First, we revamped the settings for which courses to include. It's now clear and easy to control courses in progress, drop courses, and even courses across your school levels. Additionally, on transcripts, you can now include transcript categories, summarizing the credits by category or for each year of the student's enrollment or by the category itself. Next, a big idea bank ask. You are now able to review when students last opened their report cards or transcripts, and this new list is accessible by going to the template. It should make it easier to know if any information has been reviewed when having conversations with students. And last but not least, transcript actions have been moved on to the student profiles, so no more having to drill down into green menus to note when a transcript was sent to another institution. We have some really exciting things that we are working on that will be coming soon. First, we have some degree improvements. So already available, we have future course enrollments now display within the requirements area on a student profile. So advisors or administrators can now truly get a full view of how soon is progressing towards their program without having to jump back and forth with their schedule for the next term or year. And in progress, we are currently in development on adding support for making a degree or area of study marked as inactive. So, previously, if a student changed programs, it was requiring you to delete the previous program to ensure clarity on what the student was working towards. So with these new settings, you'll be able to mark those programs inactive for the student and set a date of when they stopped pursuing it, better data for better reporting, and expect to see more about that in the coming weeks. And next, we are bringing internal notes to the student information system student profiles. So official notes are currently our catchall for notes within the SIS. So this project begins our journey of providing clear spots to document information for students. These internal notes will exist only for your admin users, so no worries about information being sent to students or faculty. Internal notes will be going live for all institutions early this summer. And next, we have attendance thresholds. So this project is a complete overhaul of how you can track and manage student absences against set thresholds. Previously, doing this required you to use conduct and set infractions for each threshold, and this new feature lives entirely in attendance. Institutions now have more options for how the thresholds calculate and can create multiple groups of them. And then what happens when a student meets a threshold has now been given more flexibility. Institutions get to define what occurs, from nothing occurring to notifications to actually adding those infractions, and potentially more as we gather your continued feedback. We're just kicking off our early adopter program now with a goal being generally available this summer. If you're interested in participating in that EAP, please reach out. Our next project, you've hopefully heard of before, but we're excited to be heading into our next phase. We are beginning our Early Adopter Program for Student Success Insights. This feature will allow schools to define calculations to locate students who are at risk, whether it's failing a class, completing their term, or graduating. So data points from across the student information system learning management will initially be available to choose from when creating the calculations. With this feature, you'll be able to locate and focus on those who need the most support. So save time on the admin side to instead focus on time with those students. This feature will also provide transparency and clarity into the data that factored into the student status, ensuring that institutions can make educated decisions about next steps per student. No more multiple reports or relying solely on faculty flagging concerns. Use data to drive more powerful outcomes for your students' education. With that, I'll hand back to you, Mike. Yes. So now we'll be talking through a couple of updates that have come to the learning management system in the last six months. Mainly, we'll be discussing assignments, assessments, community updates, as well as some improvements to our medical lists. First, I wanna talk through lockdown browser. Lockdown browser is an optional add on that is available to all of your institutions. Now this does come at an additional cost. However, you can trial the feature prior to making the purchase. Both the trial and the purchase can be found directly from within education management. If you are a organization admin and a platform manager, you can go into core settings, activate new features to find the trial for LockDown Browser. Now lockdown browser integrates directly with our online assessment tool, ensuring that while students are taking high stakes online exams, they can't access outside resources. A lot of information and helpful, documentation can be found on that activate new features page as well as a video guiding you through how to set up the feature for the first time. Again, if you're interested in learning more about this, please, you can go check that out now in core settings, activate new features. We also have made a pretty big improvement to our assignments experience. Now this particular feature is in what we call limited availability, meaning that you as an organization must first go in and activate it prior to your faculty being able to access both the new assignment creation tool as well as the assignment grading tool. This can be found in core settings to activate new features as well if you go to the feature preview section. With this update turned on, your faculty will get access to what we call quick assignments, which will give them a quicker, more efficient way of both creating and grading assignments. A few features that help them in their workflows, for example, are the increase in total preferences that your faculty are able to select from. That way, they can set and forget certain field values if they are often utilizing and defaulting to those same, values time and time again as they're creating assignments. Additionally, as students are submitting work and the teacher wants to grade that work, when they open up the assignment and click on a student's name, the student submitted work will automatically display in the left hand pane. This saves the teacher a click or two, not having to open up the document in a separate tab or browser. Additionally, they can see the grade or see the information that the student submitted as well as grade and comment on the submission on the right hand pane at the same time. No longer do they have to continuously flip back and forth between what the student submitted and grading the submission. Rather, they can look at both and perform both tasks simultaneously. We also have made several updates to our community experience. Now prior to this update, a lot of the community pages existed in Podium, which, again, was that older architecture. We've since moved several of these setup pages to our new Sky UX. And those pages include things like community group pages, add slash edit community groups, approve a community groups, and community categories. There are a few more pages in this experience that we still have to move out of Podium and put into Skye. For example, managing community group rosters is something that's on our road map in the near future. Just know that that community update is largely complete with a couple of pages that will be coming to you in the future. And with that, I'll pass it over to Jacqueline to talk through some improvements that we made to medical lists. Perfect. So our last area that's available now are some improvements with our medical lists. We've added a number of columns and filters to the various medical lists, many based on requests from the IDEA Bank. This also marks the moment that every single data point that you've entered in on the medical tab of a student record can now be exported by your nurse users through the app. Your data is yours to consume and manage. And then back to you, Mike, for what's next in learning management. Yes. And we have four pretty big features coming to the learning management system in the near future. We'll talk through some AI related features related to feedback generation. We'll also take a look at an overhaul coming to the browse groups function, course reporting, which we're really excited about giving department chairs some high level analytics about how the various courses within their department are functioning, and an enhanced integration with Microsoft three six five. First, I wanna talk through course reporting. This is going to be a new feature set for a particular group of individuals at your institution that haven't had this kind of insight before, department chairs. We'll be creating a brand new role for department chairs that you, also, admin, will be able to control and manage. Now as a department chair, you will gain access to a brand new dashboard. This dashboard will house things like actionable insights as well as information about the various core sections within their given department. I will also note that department chairs will gain view only access to Gradebook and group pages. If you're currently having to do something like cloning platform manager to give department chairs the ability to impersonate teachers, or other faculty members within their given department, that will no longer be necessary as they'll be able to access all of the Gradebook information within their given department without being able to edit it. Additionally, admin will be able to customize which visual visualizations and which data points display on this dashboard for their department chairs and for their faculty. So if there's a particular data point or visualization that doesn't pertain to your particular institution, you'll be able to turn that off and manage it from an admin perspective. Additionally, not only will department chairs be getting a similar or a dashboard view, Teachers and faculty will also be getting that same view. However, as a faculty member, when you're looking at the dashboard, it will be limited to just their own information. So that way faculty can also get some insights about the various core sections that they are teaching throughout the academic year. Now we have a big update coming to our portal experience, and this is coming to our browse groups function. This is the last podium based experience that exists within our portal, so we're really excited to get that revamped and pushed out to users as we know that it's gonna make a really meaningful impact to their day to day. Now this particular, update, we're taking a look at a couple of things to make sure that this really meets users' needs. First, we wanted to ensure that finding groups was as easy as humanly possible. So we've really worked through reducing the total number of clicks it takes in order to access particular group types and the particular group that a user might be searching for. Additionally, we wanted to make sure that this particular page was very mobile friendly. We know that several students and faculty members are accessing browse groups directly from their phones, and ensuring that this experience is easy and responsive on mobile devices was super important. This will be in an early adopter program later on this calendar year. So if you're interested in participating, keep a lookout in the community as we'll be doing recruitment there. Next up, I wanna talk through one of our AI related features. This is what we call the feedback generation tool. And the feedback generation tool is enabling faculty to deliver quicker and more, personalized feedback to students. Now this is not meant to be a replacement for things like summative based assessments. Rather, this is more so targeted for formative based assessments or things where the teacher may not necessarily have, time to go ahead and really give solid feedback to students. This is to enable them to give even more feedback than what they were able to do today. With this particular update, faculties will faculty will be able to leverage the feedback generation tool in two separate locations. The first of which is on the assignment grading screen. The second of which is when they are entering in grade report comments. In both of these experiences, faculties faculty will be able to use a form like experience to insert what kind of information they want the tool to output. And then through the power of generative AI and the information within your database, we help to deliver personalized information, and feedback to the student. Now throughout this entire experience, the faculty is always in control. So they first must start the process. And then after the tool has output some kind of feedback, the faculty member can always go in and make edits as needed. This particular option will also be togglable by you as admin. So if there are certain areas where you want this to display or if you only want this to display for certain school levels, for example, or certain locations, you'll have control over where and how this particular tool displays to your faculty members. The last feature that I'll talk about for learning management is an enhanced integration with Microsoft three six five. This leverages LTI 1.3, and it enables several different Microsoft capabilities within our learning management system. When this is turned on, faculty and students will be able to access OneDrive, OneNote, Teams, Teams meetings, reflect, and copilot all directly from within our learning management system. They'll be able to submit and manage OneDrive files on assignments, both from a faculty and student perspective within our learning management system. All of this is also controlled and handled by Microsoft. So the sharing rights of files automatically gets permissioned through the learning management tool. So that way, students don't have to worry about sharing documents to their teachers and vice versa. The tool handles all of that information directly. Additionally, when this is turned on, a brand new tab will display on pages called Microsoft where faculty and students can go to access these tools. This is embedded directly from within the system, system, so they do not have to go into one driver team separately. They can manage it all directly from our learning management system. And with that, I'm gonna go ahead and hand it over to the next presenter to talk through enrollment management. Thanks, Mike. I'm Steven Boyle. I am the product manager for our integrations teams as well as our enrollment management. I've been at Blackbaud for actually, going at thirty years on in next month in June, and it's been predominantly in our education products, but I also took a detour over into Raiser's Edge and Financial Edge. So let's get started. Our, school website and communications team has, been working on the, our push pages area as Jesse mentioned, in in her part of the presentation. We will be working to not only modernize, the rest of the list, but to provide an reimagined and reengineered, push page experience. We want to provide all the things that you love with a modern interface, and with some sought after extras like branding support, while still maintaining the the power of the push page functionality of the dynamic content, and access to your distribution groups. For our partners and integrations team, we've had a a lot of work over the the various areas. Starting with just in general, a lot of of minor enhancements to all of our APIs, but, specifically, we've got a a new education core API in which we've moved to general release. This API houses our file attachment upload endpoints as well as providing user search capabilities. And, I think most sought after is our new and improved advanced list endpoints, which we will have provided here as a way of delivering all of the content from an advanced list in one call instead of having a paginated version at that our legacy list endpoints use today. And we continue to work on that as well which I'll go to I'll go through more in the in the future slide. In the academics API, also a new API, this is in preview still, but here you can see, we've added data access to our learning profiles, including the ability to surface learning plans from external sources. This in combination with that Education Core file upload capability, gives you the ability to have a counseling or guidance, service that, houses all of of that interaction while only needing to surface what you want your instructors to have in terms of a learning plan or a learning profile about for a student. And then lastly, in our enrollment management API, we've added access to our contracts with a few endpoints to get contracts for a student as well as get a specific contract, And there will be more work in that area as well. Another sought after, Sky platform capability that our other products like RE and FE have had in the past is coming to the education products, and that is our Sky add ins. This allows a partner system to or, or one of your own Sky applications to surface external data within the product itself. We've got several areas where this is, what we call extension points where you can, add a tile and have it show, live inside the product. Namely some of those are on the academics profile. You have the contact card tab and the conduct tab, have access areas as well in as in unit user communications. So if you have an external system that does, broadcast communications, you can surface their communication logs juxtaposed with your internal, Blackbaud communication logs for a student. In enrollment management, the home page can show, partner data regarding admission statistics or marketing information. And then in our parent portal, on the billing area, the payment plans and the current bill pages have extension points where you can surface information coming from partners in that area. Coming soon in our partners and integrations, the common records engine is a sync between the education office and your advancement office. This is an EAP for our k 12 schools right now. In the second half of the year, we'll be working to make this available to our higher ed schools as well. There are some resources available now if you get the slide deck that you can, you can get to these links just to give you an idea of the scope of of the integration and what's kept in sync and how. But in general, records that start out in your education office can be sent over to Raizer's Edge from scratch, adding new records or by linking to existing records. And then once you've linked records, the data the common data between those two records can be kept in sync in both directions, which is an improvement over our existing ConnectRE functionality. And like I said, this is targeting q four of this year. In the Sky API enhancement world, we will continue to work across the board in maintaining and improving our APIs. But some specific areas of focus are on the the the new listing points that I talked about in our available now section. We plan to increase their functionality to include the ability to produce sky lists through the API as well. You'll rec by sky list, I'm I'm referring to those, those lists that in the manage report or in the reporting manage lists area. You'd see them there as well as in, for instance, in the academics scheduling. You can have a classes list or students list, courses list. They're all across our product, and we are excited to be able to provide this data, which would improve the scope of projects and, things that your partners, can use to to build their projects as well. And then lastly, in the the academics API that have that house our learning profile access endpoints, we're planning to move that to full release, in the near future. Moving on to our enrollment management product, we've got several areas that we've been working on. To start, in the candidate portal area, we have enhanced the decision information that is provided through our, our our portal pages with easier setup, more customizable, more, merge fields, support for for branding across, across your decisions in your schools, as well as, for your acceptance decisions, who doesn't like confetti. So all of that is in the, in the product now for enrollment management. We've also been working on our contracts. More flexibility and control is the watchword. In the assignment and generation of contracts, we've provided the ability, in in most cases, when assigning a contract, you tend to generate at the same time. We've given you a an easy way to do that all in one in one fell swoop. And then we've also provided ways to have more flexible contracts, allowing you to have fewer contract types depending on your due date for your contracts. If you have a rolling admissions process, we've improved the flexibility of due date calculations as well as given you the ability to set due dates manually when you generate contracts. So you have a lot of control over that information now. And then our payment plans have some additional flexibility in that if you have, established payment plans that have different start dates, for instance, if the first payment of a of a two pay plan expires in August so that you can have a second version of your two pay plan that has its first payment in September, we have the ability for you to have a start and end dates on those payment plans allowing contracts to be more flexible and thus requiring fewer contract types. The, the last of our available now features is on demand school forms. This is, once again, aimed at reducing the strain on your staff. When you have forms that you want anybody to be able to fill out, for instance, a volunteer form, or a permission form, you can use these on demand school forms, which is essentially providing a URL link that once you provide it to a student, essentially lets them self assign this, this form to them, and they can fill it out. That relieves, time and effort required by your administration staff, and you can use these, URLs in in in anywhere. You can send them through an email or you can provide them, through a resource board or however you, typically would want to provide this kind of thing to your community. In the coming soon features for the enrollment management product, we are have some common threads. In back in our contracts, for schools that are connecting to our billing product, we have a partner, vertical insurance, that can provide tuition insurance if that is a a service that you wanna provide, and you can base you know, whether it's based on your payment plans that you're offered or not. This allows the burden to be taken off of the school, because the relationship is directly between the student and your partner, and embedding that in your contract process makes it a seamless, and friction free workflow for your student as they go through the contract process. The checklist has gotten some additional flexibility, in terms of due dates. Similar to the contract, if you have rolling due dates for, checklist items that your admissions process requires, there are two flavors of of this that we have supported. One if you have a rolling due date that just depends on when the student comes into your process. You can base it on a specific date or on a date based on when they enter the process. So like, two weeks after you assign a checklist, you can have those due dates be set that way. And then you can also have a progressive due date model where you can base the due date on of one checklist step on a previously completed checklist step. The hope here and the aim here is to provide flexibility, allowing you to to tailor these checklist steps to your business process. Also, in our enrollment, we have a new product available for schools that, are not using the admissions, actions in our EMS product but still want that contract connection to our billing product. So in, with this product, it is aimed at just providing those enrollment activities such as contracts, such as forms and student checklists. These areas are are supported in the product while not cluttering the rest of the interface with the admissions tasks. So look for this coming soon. Also in our contracts area, we're working on a completely reimagined contract experience. The goal to be reducing the number of contracts required to support your community. If you have contracts based on whether they're new or returning, whether they are domestic or international students, we're providing conditional logic in the new contract builder, that allows you to to specify the the fees, tuition, even text blocks that are based on this characteristics of the student. Also, in this process, when assigning contracts to students, you'll have the ability to essentially override all of those very things. So if it's if you need to prorate the tuition for whatever reason or the fees or specify specific, fees to add or remove, or payment plans, you have that capability, as well as setting the, manually setting the due dates the publish and expire dates pretty much anything associated with the contract can be overridden when you go to assign the contract. So the increased flexibility here is all meant to reduce the strain of getting ready for your each coming academic year. And that leads me to my colleague, Julia. Take it away. Thanks, Steven. Hey, everyone. I'm Julia Messick. I'm the product manager for Blackbaud billing management, and I've got some exciting things to share, that the team has been delivering and working on for billing management. So let's jump right in. So the first here is a new notification type that you can configure to notify students, payers, of charges that have been added to their account. This is especially handy if, you're billing incidentals throughout the semester or things outside of tuition, and your students are on incidental autopay. You can configure this notification. It's a payer based notification. So if you have a payer who is responsible for multiple students, they'll receive one instance of the notification outlining the charges that are due for all of their students that they're responsible for. We have, refunds that is in limited availability release. Refunds is a new record type, new transaction type within billing management. This allows your organization to track money due back to a student. May that be, you know, over, overpaid financial aid or something that was paid for that, of course, needs to be refunded. Before this feature was released, you would track that with an offsetting charge, which could be confusing to students and payers looking at a statement or out in the payer portal seeing a charge with a refund versus just this first class refund record. I mentioned that this is in limited availability release. We have one more wave to go. So if your organization doesn't see it yet, it will be released next Tuesday, to all remaining organizations. We have had the option to use project IDs from FE NXT in billing management for a while, but there are some places that, we didn't allow project IDs to be configured. So if your organization is one that requires projects on all accounts within FE NXT, you're likely not using the direct post from billing management into FE NXT. But as of a few weeks ago, we released an enhancement that allows you to set project segments at all account levels. So this is, an example from our default accounts, which is an important area to be able to set these project IDs. So you can set them now for defaults and then also for miscellaneous fees and then in various places where you could override accounts. For example, when you add a payment, there's an option to override the default cash account that now also has project ID segments. The payer portal has gotten some, some love recently. So, starting with a new type of statement, we have a payment statement, that's available. This is a way for students to self serve and print off a statement of where their payments have been applied. So if they need to provide evidence of payment for tuition, they no longer have to contact you for those changes. They're able to view this out in the payer portal themselves. Also, in the payer portal, we've made some small but mighty, changes out here in, terms of usability for payers out in the payer portal. The first is the top left. The amount due used to be a link, to a page that broke down the amounts that was due. We were noticing that payers were not finding that. So we made it a first class button. That button takes them to the same place, and we've noticed a huge uptick in, clicks to that link now that it's more findable. We also moved up the upcoming due dates tile that was below the recent activity, and it was getting hidden being, below the fold, if you will. So moving that up, we have also seen an uptick in payers finding that information and being able to self serve to figure out what those amounts are, what makes up that amount rather than having to contact your organization. And then lastly, if your students are on a payment plan, in recent activity, the payment plan tile or the payment plan charges inside the tile would just show as a payment plan installment. We've added a little helplet where when the payer hovers over the helplet, they can now get a breakdown of what's included in that payment plan installment charge and the amounts. Let's switch over to see what's coming next for billing managements. The first is a change, having to do with being able to adjust posted charges. So today, if you need to adjust something about a a charge, maybe a student is taking on a higher course load, we have options to run, processes in the system for unposted charges to be able to adjust. But if you need to make an adjustment for a posted charge, there's no great way to do that today. So with this change, you'll be able to adjust charges up or down with the amounts. It'll create an adjustment record, which will then post over to your general ledger. And then lastly, my personal favorite is our collections assistant feature. Right now, it's in a customer tech preview. We are headed into EAP for this soon. With collections assistant, we are pulling all relevant information about a student's account so that you're able to make a determination in how you communicate with them about that past due balance. So most organizations are using our built in notifications today, but we've heard from many that when it gets past that point, you guys are having to spend time in your email clients, copying, pasting, looking around for different information about the student's account balance, to then make that personalized touch to follow-up with them. With collections assistant, you're getting all of that information in one place. And with the use of Blackbaud AI, you're able to tailor that message, and send an email, send a communication directly out of billing management. It will log the communication to the student's account. And so you're not having to refer back to emails outside of the system or copy and paste content from email into a student note or action. It's all right there within billing management. If this is something that your organization is interested in being part of the early adopter program, you can reach out to me. I'll also be posting some, links soon out on the forums and in our release notes. But you can reach out to me. It's julia.messic@blackbaud.com. And with that, thank you guys so much for taking time out of your busy day. I know we ran a little bit over. I appreciate you guys hanging out. Thanks so much for for sticking around and learning about all the things that we've been working on in education management. Have a great rest of your day.