CODESERV.US » blackboard

Blackboard Learning Environment Connector for Sakai

jmpease — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:32:01 +0000

With last week’s release of Blackboard Learn Release 9, the first release in the new Project NG series, people can begin to explore my implementation of the Learning Environment Connector API to integrate Sakai 2.5.3+ with Blackboard.

The integration consists of two parts, a Building Block portion contributed to the OSCELOT community found here
http://projects.oscelot.org/gf/project/bb-sakai-lec/ under the Apache License, Version 2.0,
and a Sakai project contributed to the Sakai community here
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/BBLEC under the Educational Community License, Version 2.0. Combined, the two enhancements enable the integration of Sakai user, course and enrollment data into Blackboard and allows the users to access their Sakai course data from within the Blackboard user interface.

While the initial release of the connector implementation should still be considered beta, we’ve successfully tested and demonstrated the implementation and plan to begin further testing by the end of February. Hopefully we’ll have the integration running in production locally for the start of the next Fall semester.

For further details, including screenshots, please visit either of the links above. I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback!

Blackboard/Sakai Learning Environment Connector

jmpease — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 18:51:07 +0000

I haven’t posted an update in awhile since I’ve been “heads down” working on the integration between the Sakai CLE and Blackboard learning environments. It’s a lot to do in a short amount of time, but things are going well…I have good help. More updates/details regarding the project to follow once the connector is released alongside Blackboard 9, the first release of the new Project NG series.

Course Merge Building Block

jmpease — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:33:18 +0000

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.