Major Release Change Management Tips (v18.1)

We understand that rolling out updates at your school can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you and your staff may be excited about new features or improvements to workflows. On the other hand, there will inevitably be reluctance to retrain the muscle memory and learn how to do things in new ways. So, we thought we would share a few tips with you; a change management cheat sheet that aims to assist you to minimise disruption, prepare, equip and support your staff to successfully adopt the new features and changes.

We have identified 5 key areas that will help you manage the change process below.

A successful change requires leadership or project owners to take the time to understand the scope of the changes and plan how to introduce them to the wider staff. We suggest that you:

• Review the provided release notes, webinar, and documentation, including the Changes in Schoolbox from v18 to v18.1 for Teachers doc. 
• Set up a rollout management group and assign responsibilities (e.g. testing of beta release, establishing a group of champions, chasing policy decisions, etc).
• Engage with your leadership team to inform them and secure their endorsement and support for the planned upgrade/launch process.
• Collect data, as you go, about what works best when rolling out a release at your school. Design feedback loops for continuous improvement. You may not have data to inform your upgrade for this release, but it would be valuable to collect it for the next release!

Every school will have its own calendar of events that may impact when you decide to upgrade to v18.1. You may be introducing another new system at the school or have a jammed-packed PD schedule for the next term already. Things like this are important to take into account when planning your upgrade. We suggest that you:

• Plan early & be inclusive!
• Create a realistic timeline of tasks that the school needs to perform before you are ready to upgrade. This will differ from school to school, depending on what you aim to achieve and what new features you intend on using. We suggest that you decide on your end launch goal and plan backwards. We suggest that you:
  • Allow enough time so that your rollout team can test the new release with your own data. Make sure this includes testing of all your custom work.
  • Free up time and resources to facilitate testing; this may involve wrapping up other open projects you have under way and making use of your Schoolbox dev server. You can then contact us to schedule an upgrade.
  • Plan time for your teaching staff to familiarise themselves with the new interfaces and workflows around the submissions system. The time required depends on the depth of use in new areas and your past experiences getting your teachers up-to-speed. 
• Delay the upgrade if necessary; control the rate and the amount of change you are imposing on your staff.

• Recruit champions to skill-up and accelerate adoption for the rest of your staff. Encourage them to get actively involved in testing the release on your Schoolbox dev server.
• Monitor test outcomes - refer, at a minimum, to the Release Notes and the Changes in Schoolbox from v18 to v18.1 for Teachers.
• Contact your Daily Organiser & PD leader to request time for training, resource preparation, and relief teachers - where applicable.
• Test all your custom work as soon as possible and communicate with your Technical Account Manager to discuss any issues.
• Consider creating your own resources to present the new features and highlight the changes. Check out the Inspiration area of Schoolbox Help.

• Think about which are the best communication channels to reach out to your staff (team lunch, staff room announcement, email). Consider using a survey to collect the communication preferences of your staff; use the feedback to adjust your strategy.
• Distribute the available materials (e.g. links to Schoolbox Help, videos, release notes, in-house assets).
• Consider customising your Teacher Course to add helpful hints and tips for your staff.
• Use your internal communication tools to clarify and promote the new release (e.g: news articles in Schoolbox, staff newsletter or email digest).
• Leverage your marketing mechanisms to promote the new features to the wider community.

New policies will be required for some of the introduced changes, including:

School Communication and News

There is a new page to configure policies for News in the Administration system. If you want to use some of the new communication features, such as moderation, Superusers will need to visit this page and configure the settings.

Below we outline the effects of some of the toggles on this page and the policy implications that you need to consider.

Toggle: Allow staff to modify news

This toggle replaces the toggle in Administration > Settings > Policy > “Allow Others to Edit News”. When you update to v18.1, it will be in whatever position the “Allow Others to Edit News” toggle was in before you updated.

If this is enabled, staff with write access to a page or folder will be able to modify news posted by other staff to that page or folder.

Toggle: Allowing staff to post news.

This toggle replaces the toggle in Administration > Settings > Policy > “Allow Staff to Create News”. When you update to v18.1, it will be in whatever position the “Allow Staff to Create News” toggle was in before you updated.

If you have this switched to off, staff will only be able to post news to pages or folders where they have write access. If that page or folder has a group or class attached, the news will appear on a news component on the page, however it will also appear in the dashboard news of all the members of the group or class.  Just like in v18.0, they will not be able to create news for a Campus or Role. Additionally, they will not be able to post news for any of the new audience segments that are available in the v18.1 update.

You may give staff the service permission of News “write” in order to give individuals permission to post to the audience segments and to classes, groups, or other pages where they do not have write access.

Policies around who can post to all audiences may need to be updated if you wish to change this setting and if you wish to use this setting in conjunction with moderation.

Toggle: Global Moderation

If this feature is turned on in your instance, some news articles will need to be reviewed by a moderator prior to publication. The news that will enter moderation is that which is targeted at an audience from one of the following segments:

• Campus
• Roles
• Houses
• Year Level

NOTE: If you have group pages that are aimed at the above segments, the author must choose the audience segment, not the group page in order to allow moderation.

Staff with “moderate” news permissions will have the ability to modify, publish, delete, or reject news that enters moderation. Irregardless of moderation being on, staff will be able to post news to a class or group without moderation if they have write access to that class or group page.

If you have the “Allow Staff to Post to all Audiences” toggle off, then individuals with News “write” permissions can write news. This news will then be moderated by users with the News “moderate” permission.

Your policy will need to reflect:

• Decisions around whether current group communication pages should continue, and what information should appear on those pages. Remember, any moderated news for the audience of a group communication page will go directly to dashboard news for those users, it will not appear on the group page and cannot be seen by any users outside of the audience segment.

• Adequate training for staff with moderator access to understand the implications of this permission.

• Which staff your school will allow to be news writers and news moderators.

Course Markbook

If your school is on the Pro or Elite plans, a Superuser can turn this on by going to Administration > Settings > Modules.

By default, this toggle is switched off. This toggle will need to be switched on in order for staff to view the Course Markbook. This will add a new drop-down option in the three-dot menu in Courses, the Course Outline, and Course homepages. All staff have access to the Coursewide Markbook.

Atlas Course Importer

Only schools on the Pro or Elite plan will be able to use this feature. In order to enable it, you will first have to attain an API key from Atlas. This should be added to the Rubicon Atlas API Token field, in the 3rd Party Services tab in the Administration system.

Before enabling this, you may want to consider the implications of switching from building courses in Schoolbox to building courses in Atlas, and understanding the difference in the workflow.

Please note that an import from Atlas is one time only. Once a course is imported, any changes made in Atlas won’t appear in the course in Schoolbox. Although you can modify the course in Schoolbox, those changes won’t write-back in Atlas, so this will need to be communicated to your staff.

Display Chosen Work Types on the Grade Summary Page

A Superuser can turn on this capability by navigating to Administration > Lists > Work Types, and ticking the check-boxes next to the work type you wish to display. The chosen work types will then appear at the top of the Grades summary page.

You should inform teachers about which work types have been chosen and how they will display on the grades page. Teachers can then select the appropriate work types when they are creating a Due Work. Policies in your school will be needed regarding the type of feedback that is written for these work types, since it will be displayed so prominently to parents.