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Blackboard Grade Distiller

Grade Distiller allows for the aggregation of an arbitrary set of Grade Center Columns from an arbitrary set of courses from within Blackboard Learn. This is done via Blackboard's REST WEB API, which requires Version 3000.3.0 or higher of Blackboard Learn. Using the provided RegEx expressions to select both the desired courses and columns from within those courses, Grade Distiller generates a CSV File containing the user's username, the course that they are enrolled in, and their grade in each of the columns (which are matched between courses by name).

Usage

Prerequisite: Blackboard Configuration has been completed.

To start the Grade Distiller using the easy-start script, enter the following command in the command line, while within the directory containing thew script and the distiller jar file.

./extract.sh

If you receive an error that the file is not executable, you may need to make it executable via the following command:

chmod +x extract.sh

For selecting both Courses and Columns from Blackboard, a Regular Expression is used to select the desired courses and columns. A few examples are included below, and expressions can be tested on a sample course name using online tools, like RegExr.

If this is the first time running the distiller, the script will need to generate a list of all of the courses in your Blackboard Learn instance. Depending on the number of courses, this can take a while (about 30 minutes for an installation with over 100,000 courses). This generation will not need to be done again, unless the course list is updated and does not currently contain a course which you would like to pull grades from.

Once the distillation is complete, the script will exit, having saved the results in the specified output file (grades.csv by default).

Selector Examples

Courses

Expression Use Case
.* All Columns
Test.* All Columns that begin with "Test" (Case Sensitive)
[Tt]est.* All Columns that begin with "Test" (Case Insensitive)

Columns

Expression Use Case
.* All Columns
Test.* All Columns that begin with "Test" (Case Sensitive)
[Tt]est.* All Columns that begin with "Test" (Case Insensitive)

Blackboard Configuration

Once the API Application has been whitelisted with your Blackboard Installation, which is described on Blackboard's Developer Community Site Managing REST Integrations in Learn, you will need to configure the execution script with the correct configuration variables, listed below.

Variable Name Usage Example Value
BB-URL Blackboard Learn Root URL https://my-site.blackboard.com
BB-KEY REST API Application Key 68ecd4c9-3e8b-4e27-9527-5d646285ac30
BB-SECRET REST API Application Secret hpeWLBEX32Bzcyr8USEJ

The user to which the API will be bound in Blackboard must have at least the following entitlements to function correctly:

Entitlement Display Name in Blackboard
course.user.VIEW Course/Organization Control Panel (Users and Groups) > Users
course.gradebook.MODIFY Course/Organization Control Panel (Grade Center) > All Grading
system.user.VIEW Administrator Panel (Users) > Users