Migration guide for previous users of bb scripts

Recap: the old workflow

With Blackboard, typically one teaching assistant would be in charge of distributing assignments. He/she would:

1. Run wizard.sh once, at the start of the course, to configure the scripts (i.e.. select the course and list all the graders)

2. Run verdeel.sh weekly, which would download all ungraded submissions, sanitize them, split the workload and distribute it (together with a subset of bb-scripts) to the assistants via email.

Then, all the grading assistants would:

3. Grade the homework by editing the s123456.txt file inside each folder, by setting the Current Grade: and adding Feedback:

4. After all (or a portion) was done, run feedback.sh, which would email the feedback to the student, and upload the grades to the Grade Center.

How to apply the current scripts

Primarily, everything that the old scripts would "Engage Blackboard" for (and suggest you take some coffee) is no longer part of the offered functionality. This means that:

1. wizard.sh is not (currently) used: there is less to configure, and you do that by manually configuring verdeel.sh.

2. verdeel.sh can still be used, but you have to download the assignments you want to distribute manually from Brightspace (see verdeel.sh, and How to do common tasks with Brightspace). Other changes:

   • Grading assistants no longer get the s123456.txt text files, where they would enter grades. They do get a #comments.txt file, containing the comments students entered in Brightspace for the submission.
   • The old scripts allowed you to assign a fixed teaching assistant for groups of students, so they would be graded by the same assistant every week. Simply using Brightspace groups (I think) offers a nicer way to do this.

3. There is no s123456.txt file, so there is not an "obvious" place to put feedback and grades. On the other hand, Brightspace supports any type of feedback by allowing you to send files back to individual students (see How to do common tasks with Brightspace). So you simply need to decide on how to do feedback. Some suggestions:

   • Create a file called 'feedback.txt' or some such.
   • Put comments into the source code that students have submitted.
   • Create a LaTeX template for feedback, edit/generate that, and send students a much nicer form of feedback.

4. Instead of running a shell script to send email, my suggestion is to use the Brightspace feedback feature outlined above. Apart from allowing rich feedback, this also has the benefit that you can see when students have read their feedback. Also, grades can be easily entered by downloading a .CSV or Excel file from Brightspace, and then re-uploading that. See How to do common tasks with Brightspace.

   Do make sure that you do not accidentally send students files that you do not want them to see, such as object files that result from program compilation!

   • In case you do want to use the old method of emailing students their assignments, make sure you also have downloaded a exported CSV file containing grade information; in that case, you can use feedback.sh.

So, this is slightly (but only slightly) more work than in the old version, but for the time being it is also a good way for teaching assistants to become familiar with Brightspace.

Future work

Jos Craaijo has been working on a command line interface for interacting with Brightspace, which can be found at https://github.com/Jos635/brightspace-cli. This basically exposes the Brightspace API for use by bash scripts such as these. This is already a vast improvement on what the old scripts could do.

So at some point, the current functionality of (what is left of) bb-scripts may be extended yet again so that it downloads assignments and uploads grades unattended.

However, the first priority is to establish new best practices for handing feedback to students; once it is clear what it is you (or your teaching assistants) feel most comfortable with, many collegeaus and students can create a technical solution in no time.