I learned today that the Grade Level checkboxes are now required on Courses, and that if you attempt to edit an existing course that did not have any grade level boxes checked (for example, trying to change the "Print on transcript" setting), it will not allow you to save until you have checked at least one grade level box. While there is an asterisk in the Course Details box, if you're editing another section like Settings, you might not even open that, so there's no way to have known that the grade level also has to be set for changes to be saved.

I may have missed it, but I went back to look through both the Course help info and the Dec 10 announcement about the Courses and Departments refresh, but didn't see this noted in either place. If a field is required before changes can be saved, a specific message needs to be displayed alerting to this.

Hi Mike, I second Liz's comment. As a Georgia school that needs to submit transcripts to GA Student Finance Commission (GSFC) for HOPE Scholarship processing, it is concerning that this important field is getting muddied and might be lost as the development team is continually working on enhancements. We were told that the standard code field was set to pull information onto the electronic transcript to be used for schools in GA (when EM was still OnRecord) to address the GSFC requirements for GA schools. With it now being labeled as “Canadian transcript standard code” it is misleading, as Liz shared. It is still very much needed by GA schools. Could it be that BB is developing a way for GA schools to easily pull the transcripts in GSFC format--maybe the whole HS, or at least grade level, and not broken out by alphabet (it takes 20 pulls to pull the transcripts for a high school, then they have to be converted and copied into NotePad before they can be submitted to GSFC)??? That would be wonderful. Thank you for your awareness of the change in terminology of this important field and taking this into consideration as BB continues to make enhancements. Hope you have a great day and may it be filled with little miracles!

Mike,

In Blackbaud's new Courses interface, the 'Standard Code' field is labeled as 'Canadian transcript standard code.' However, this field is actually required for the successful uploading of transcript data to Georgia's Student Finance Commission. The current label is misleading, as it suggests the field is only relevant to Canadian transcripts, when in fact, it is important in Georgia as well. Hope this can be taken into consideration. Thank you!

Hi Mike,

Thank you very much for responding! It's very much appreciated. This is certainly good information to know and I am sure puts many at ease, since there are a lot of up and coming course updated that schools need to make when it comes to Course Request pre-requisites and especially Schedule Maker parameter updates.

I have been advising schools to build a "Courses lists" in Academics > Scheduling then applying a filter to define the "offered in" year of 2025-2026 when they're ready to start update parameters for the upcoming course request/scheduling season. They can simply click on the course title from the list to edit the course, then hit "Back" as opposed to the breadcrumb trail, or re-navigate to Academics > Scheduling > Courses List. Both of which lead them back to their course list with the original parameters and search criteria/sorting options that were previously selected prior to clicking into the course to edit. Looking forward to another update and thanks again :)

Hi Folks -

Just wanted to log a quick note here.

First, I want to thank you all for your feedback. Understanding your adoption of the newer interface certainly helps us to plan what enhancements and tweaks need to be implemented to make for a more optional experience. So, thank you for logging the pain points you have been experiencing, it is helpful!

Jacqueline and myself are going to be making a longer post outlining different pieces of feedback found within this thread, but I wanted to quickly get one piece of information out in the wild before you make some changes to your grading setups.

The issue where courses are showing all Grade Plan Groups in the dropdowns on the Grades and Skills tab is a defect. Those dropdowns should only be displaying the Grade Plan Groups that are associated with the corresponding school level found on the course record. A fix will be deployed in the near future to update these dropdowns to behave like the older experience.

More to come!

-Mike

To Kristen's point about naming conventions for grade plan groups, transcripts expect the grade plans to have the same name for every school level in order to display (think a middle schooler taking a high school course that should display on the transcript for no credit). Since the only way now to denote which grade plan group is which is to rename them to be specific to each school level, this will cause problems with courses that should show up on transcripts not displaying because of the mismatch in grade plan group names.

This should be an easy coding fix, since each course is specific to a school level; the obvious fix is to only display the grade plan groups associated with the school level selected in the course details. If no school level is selected, no grade plan groups should display.

Proof that this is a set back is when you actually find the area that you can set a transcript abbreviation (hint: it's not under the grading tab), the screen reads = "If entered, displays in place of course title". This is not true. It's true with the old builders. If we're truly moving forward, this is not the case with the "new" builders and is very misleading.

When you're trying to associate a course with a grade plan group via the grading tab (a standard grade plan because standard grade plans and assessment grade plans now live in two different tabs), the grade plan group drop down displays standard grade plan groups for ALL school levels. This has caused so much confusion with schools that have MS and US courses that have the same naming convention of grade plan groups between levels. I've had to go back and edit grade plan group naming conventions to avoid confusion between MS and HS. (MS Letter vs. US Letter). Not a big deal, but a big deal when you are troubleshooting and assume that your courses are associated with to correct grade plan groups.

Department is now required, even if you're a grade level organized school level. This is a setting in Core that's required to be set for each school level (Do you organize by department or grade level?). Maybe for good reason as mentioned initially, but if so add it as a top tier required field. Otherwise, you spend all this time adding your new course parameters only to lose it all because you can't click save.

The "Course Detail" screen doesn't initially display the course length or school level. You have to click into Edit in course detail to simply see these 2, very dominant settings. Length is initially displayed via the scheduling tab, but not in course detail.

When you apply a search criteria to find a course, click on the course, edit the course and then hit back on your browser or "Courses" from the breadcrumb trail to edit the additional courses in your search criteria, you're presented with the initial courses tab you landed on that contains ALL courses in ALL school levels. This is a huge frustration when you're trying to edit all of your English courses, for example. Hitting back or "courses" in the breadcrumb trail should bring you back to the search criteria that you've defined.

The "Teacher" column is very confusing on the course overview screen and shouldn't be taking up such valuable overview space, as these parameters are typically year specific.

Old issues:

"Maximum # of requests allowed" would be great. If it were coded. Even the knowledgeable article used to state that this doesn't work. I wasn't able to find it just now. But in testing, it still doesn't work. If it doesn't work, please remove it from view. Otherwise, it's incredibly misleading. This has been the case for years and has caused (likely unknowingly) much manual review from schools that assumed that their course requests were maxed out at the course level. This results in these schools having to go back to the students to have them make an additional request.

I completely agree. I was very disappointed to see the new interface and it has been a struggle. Creating new courses takes far more time, it takes longer to diagnose the issue if something is going wrong, and more clicks overall to get anywhere. Additionally, it appears that it is no longer possible to edit course names(?) once created, which is frustrating given that our departments occasionally request minor tweaks to titles while maintaining the content of the course.

The only feature I love is the copy functionality.

I agree. There are so many other menu interface that could be updated to be more user friendly, I can't see the reasoning behind this.

I completely agree that the new interface is making our scheduling tasks much more cumbersome. Could we please revert to the old design? The current setup lacks the ability to save filters, which previously allowed us to easily drill down by selecting divisions and departments. It’s frustrating to have to click so many times and still not see everything in one place as needed.

I strongly agree. This is a step backwards.

I agree with Kristen that the new interface is a serious setback to what Course Editor was before! I used to be able to edit classes in a single department, and be able to scroll easily from one course to the next. Not only is that functionality gone, but I have to re-select my filters after each and every class I view or edit. With so much data to be entered for courses, I really miss a simple data entry worksheet that lets you see and edit ALL the data for the class on one screen instead of having to click into all of the separate tiles.