I wrote a Blackboard building block that we use to facilitate processing of course merges. In the past, faculty would have to contact our support technicians to request that cross-listed courses and/or courses with multiple sections be merged into a single course. The technician was responsible for manually modifying an “exception” file that is read and processed by the ERP side that provides our Blackboard installation with it’s data feed (as part of the snapshot process).

The building block presents an interface to faculty that allows them to select courses to be merged from those available. The result is then written to the exception file by the course merge building block. By automating the process by which faculty can request course merges, we have reduced the number of merge request support calls for technicians.

I am sharing the building block source (licensed under the ECL version 2) in the hopes that it will help other developers get started, reference as an example, or to customize for their own purposes. Since the exception file format and back-end processing are custom to our Blackboard implementation, this building block is probably not immediately useful and/or generally applicable to meet the needs of other institutions.

I have a pending request to setup and expose portions of our subversion installation to the public for sharing of code. In the meantime, I have bundled a copy of the latest version of the building block source here:

Download Course Merge Building Block

Our wiki containing the building block documentation is not, currently, publicly available, but the source archive contains a README.txt file that is a copy of the same information.

The building block is written using the Spring Framework along with Spring Web MVC for the UI. It uses Maven 2 as the build tool and can be imported as a project into the Eclipse IDE.

Tags: blackboard, block, building, course, merge