EMEA Presentations

Not only does our institution push student, course and enrolment data from PS CS to BlackBoard (BB) via SOA web services, but recent developments now enable the request, workflow approval and creation of BB Roles to be totally managed from within a PS CS custom development (thereby doing away with manual role assignments in BB). In addition, other web services now facilitate the automated creation of special "columns" within BB Grade Center to hold specific categories of "summative" grades (see below). Rather than using PS Activity Management functionality to store grades, UP elected to store all grades in BB Grade Center. Consequently, course administrators now have the functionality within BB Grade Center to record both "formative" grades (tests, assignment, etc.) in user created columns, as well as "summative" grades (for aggregated semester grades, exam grades and final grades) in these special web-service created BB Grade Center columns. After these summative grades have been loaded into BB Grade Center, a custom developed set of functions within PS CS can be invoked that calls BB facilitated web services to extract these grades from BB Grade Center and to post these grades to PS CS. This new functionality will gradually replace the current process of preparing grade information in spreadsheets for subsequent manual uploading into PS CS.