If you are in higher ed and using EDA, there is a new release which was done a week ago which is the 1.85 version. This release should have hit your production org automatically last week. There were 2 great features released with the new release. Now you have the ability to track student grades for your programs and non credit courses with the Term Grade object. The new Attribute object would help you track special needs and other characteristics of your student and faculty which is a great addition to your arsenal!! Wondering how to you use it.

Tracking Student Grades

With the addition of Term Grade object, you can now manually update your student courses with the grades. Most of the grades now live in your SIS system like colleague, banner etc and so it is time to put them in Salesforce. Why would you want to do it? Really. Think about scenarios where your student retention teams can send automated emails on how students are progressing based on grades, due dates and also notify advisors to proactively intervene on results. Would this not help you achieve your student retention metrics!!

So How do you use it?

First ensure the profiles have access to terms, term grades and attributes objects under object settings in your profile. Enable them on your page layouts on contacts so that you can manually add grades and see the impact.  

The above contact detail page shows how you can display a student grade and attributes on a student detail page. With term grades, you can now add letter-based grades, numeric grades to students based on a course and term. Imagine how cool it would be if salesforce sends an alert to the advisor to set up an appointment on failing grades!! 😎

Please click on this link to see the details of term grade object and how to leverage it.

Attributes Feature to handle special needs of your student and faculty

Attribute feature has been available for some time in Salesforce. So if you have a use case where you would like to capture specific student needs like language-based training for international students, capture license information for your law professor, you can leverage the attribute object for it. So instead of creating custom objects for every study area and capturing information regarding dates like special needs, license info, you can do it all in one object. You can also have different business processes for each attribute type with record types and page layouts.  😆

The above screenshots show the capability of this object and what you can do with it. Please click on this link to see the details on how to leverage this object.

To summarize, here are 3 key takeaways you want to look for.

1. If you are in the process of uploading grades for your non-credit courses, leverage term grade object.
2. If you want to track specific attributes for your students, faculty which would involve start date, end date, leverage the attribute object.
3. Please join the EDA release announcements group for upcoming eda releases.

As always feel free to post your comments below and email me at buyan@eigenx.com for further questions.