Clear your Blackboard grading backlog from one daily queue

By General Input

Every ungraded submission across all your courses in one list, oldest first, so you can read, score and post feedback without hunting through Blackboard.

Integrations

  • Blackboard
  • Gmail

Type

App

Categories

  • Operations
  • Personal Productivity

Build me an app I open every day to clear my grading backlog across all the courses I teach in Blackboard. The whole point is that the grading happens inside the app: I should be able to read a submission, score it, write feedback and post it back without ever leaving the page.

The home view is one queue of every submission still waiting on a grade, across all my courses at once. Assemble it by calling Get Courses to find my courses, then Get Grade Columns on each course to list its assignments, then Get Column Attempts on each column to find the attempts that still need grading. Group the rows by course and then by assignment, sort oldest submission first, and flag anything whose due date has already passed. Each row should show the course, the assignment, the student, how long the submission has been sitting there, and the overdue flag.

Scope every view to the signed-in instructor so I only ever see my own courses. Use Get User Memberships for the signed-in user to find the courses they are enrolled in and keep only the ones where they hold an instructor role, or equivalently check Get Course Memberships for each course and match the signed-in user to an instructor role. Never show a course I do not teach.

Clicking a row opens a two-pane grading view. The left pane shows the student's submission, loaded with Get Column Attempt so I get the full detail including the submitted text, any student comments and the submission date. The right pane shows the assignment details from its grade column, meaning the name, due date, points possible and description, and underneath that a score field and a written feedback box. A single button posts the grade using Update Column Grade, writing the score, the feedback and any instructor notes for that student on that column.

Posting must be explicit, never an autosave. Update Column Grade marks the resulting grade as Posted and visible to the student the moment a score is written, so the app should make that a deliberate action: nothing is sent while I type, the post button clearly says the grade will become visible to the student, and I get a short confirmation of what was posted. As soon as a grade posts, drop that item out of the queue and advance me straight to the next one so I can work down the list without going back to the home view.

Give each course its own page. Alongside that course's ungraded queue, list the students who have not submitted anything at all: get the roster with Get Course Memberships, keep only the students, and subtract everyone who already has an attempt or a grade on that assignment, checking with Get Column Attempts and Get Column Grades. Each of those students gets a button that sends them a short nudge with Gmail's Send a Message. Pre-fill the email naming the assignment and its due date but let me edit the wording before it goes, and record who was nudged and when so the same student does not get nudged twice in one day.

Let me filter the queue down to a single course or a single assignment when I want to grade one set in a sitting, and show a running count of how many items I have cleared today. Store that count per instructor in the app's own storage so it survives a page reload and resets at the start of each day, and log each posted grade against it as I go.

A couple of practical notes for building it. The Blackboard list endpoints are paginated, so follow the paging links to build a complete queue rather than showing only the first page, and be mindful that walking every course, column and attempt is a lot of calls against a daily rate limit. Load the queue once when I open the app, cache it, and give me an obvious refresh button rather than refetching everything constantly.

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