21 June 2013, 5:47

Hi

I hope I'm in the right place for this, as I've never posted to the forum before!

 My team is looking at any kind of integrations that already exist with Mahara and Blackboard, and I found something last week on a plugin written by AUT. The link 'some more information...' doesn't seem to work though, so I wondered if anyone can tell me about this, what it does, and what versions of Blackboard it supports. I'd be very grateful for any information.

We're using Blackboard 9.1 SP10 (may be upgrading to SP12) and are also upgrading Mahara (to at least v1.5).

Thanks,

Catherine

21 June 2013, 10:53

Hello Catherine,

Congrats on your first post. :-)

I fixed the link. It was missing the "s" for https://. The correct link is https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=3985#post17713

Cheers

Kristina

24 June 2013, 2:12

Hi Kristina

Thanks very much for the fixed link, appreciate it.

Catherine

25 June 2013, 12:58

Hi Catherine,

Basically the integration has two components. One is the plugin that Stephen Lord at AUT has written. You can download the jsp file from the Mahara's plugin page. It can be used as part of a building block and be installed in Blackboard systems. It takes the student enrolment information in Blackboard and outputs the information into 3 csv feed files (users.csv, groups.csv and members.csv). These feed files then can be used by a grouping script, which was developed by Catalyst IT for AUT University, to create users,  groups, and memberships in Mahara accordingly.

It works nicely when a lecturer who has a Blackboard course also wants to use Mahara for the same class. Student accounts can be created and are put into a group using the Blackboard course name. The process is done on request and almost instantly the lecturer has got the space set up ready in Mahara.

This integration is currently working for Blackboard 9.1 SP10 and Mahara 1.6.4.

I hope the above provides you ideas what the script does. Please feel free to post questions if you want to know more about it.

We are quite happy to make it available to anyone who is interested. However, there are implementations in the code that is very specific to AUT. Just wondering what would be the best option here.

Kind regards,

Shen