TA Tooling

Various tools for teaching assistant who is working with Blackboard, a learning management system.

Installation

python -m pip install ta-tooling

Usage

Get list of students in the class

To get list of students in the class, run

ta-tooling get-student-list

The program will ask for course id, username, and password. It will login with the username password you provided and produce a CSV file of students in the course. The course id can be the actual course id or a URL to your course.

The CSV file will have the following header.

emailHandle,firstName,lastName,userId,courseMembershipId

Group submission files

To group the submission files by email handle. Download and extract the ZIP file into a directory (call source-dir in the example).

ta-tooling categorize source-dir dest-dir

In version 0.3.x the support for categorizing directly from a ZIP file is added.

Download file submitted for a question in a quiz

Note: Currently, only Firefox is supported, and webdriver is needed.

To download file submitted as an answer to a question in a quiz, first get the links by injecting the extraction code. To get the extraction code (and start the server for the code to call back to).

ta-tooling serve-inject

and follow instruction show on the web page. Obtain the user list if have not done already.

ta-tooling get-student-list

Use the student list and the download links to download the files.

ta-tooling download-links users.json files.json

Some files will not be automatically downloaded, in that case, you need to confirm the download manually (within certain time limit; otherwise, you will miss the window of file moving).

TODO

• The Accept-Origin that the submission download for a question in a quiz is relying on is expected to be tighten. The plan is to switch to the correct iframe, and execute javascript directly through selenium.
• (serve-inject) The script injected to the page will get