Blackboard Snapshot

January 28, 2006 2:12 PM

Does a program exist that will download all documents and files available on a blackboard site?

I'd like to be able to pull all the readings and powerpoint slides off of blackboard for future use. Rather than saving each indivicual file, I'd like to archive the whole ball of wax in one go. Any suggestions?

posted by The White Hat to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Is blackboard a web site? Try using wget or curl.
posted by orthogonality at 2:28 PM on January 28, 2006

Backpack does it, but wether you can use it is a different story. Support is built into v7 however with v6 you need Agilix's Mobilizer building block, and since it is a building block there is no support if it is v6 basic, only enterprise.

Try to get something like WebWhacker working.

See if you can bribe a system admin into copying the site's folder for you, as all of the files are stored on the file system, not in the DB.

If your an instructor poke around the Course admin panel. It seems like there are some bulk options in there, but I haven't used them enough to know one way or another.

Last thought: GreaseMonkey, but I don't know enough about it to know if it could do this. It sounds like it just puts a little DHTML on the page so maybe something can be done to tie all of the files within a section of a course into one download.

posted by jwells at 2:30 PM on January 28, 2006

Stuff like webwhacker (basically a GUI interaface on top of something like wget) can be had for free. Don't waste $50. Take a look at plucker.
posted by orthogonality at 2:46 PM on January 28, 2006

Assuming blackboard is a website, there are quite a few Firefox extensions that will do what you're looking for. I like DownThemAll myself, but there are plenty of others.
posted by box at 2:47 PM on January 28, 2006

Blackboard is an online courseware thing. I'd be nervous about pointing a web spider at it to download everything, since it's all dynamic and database-driven, so it's not just like you're downloading a tree.

Whether you're a student or an instructor is important -- back when I was in academentia we used OpenText FirstClass,and while it provided a bunch of backup/download options to instructors and administrators, but nothing to students.
posted by mendel at 6:45 PM on January 28, 2006

DownThemAll(mentioned above) is definitely what you are looking for... you will have to run it in each section (ie go to "course materials", downthemall, then "syllabus" or whatever and downthemall again). should work fine.
posted by tysiva at 8:49 PM on January 28, 2006

DownThemAll
posted by Hankins at 8:07 AM on January 29, 2006