© Blackboard, Inc. All rights reserved. Access Granted: P roviding Students with a Customized List of Required Textbooks

2 Textbook Building Block Overview Purpose: » To provide students with a customized list of their required textbooks for the semester. Reason:  Access to textbook information was inefficient. Major challenge:  Campus bookstore concerned with loss of control over proprietary data. Initial process:  Contact the Bookstore Director. » Determine how faculty currently request books. » Explore options currently available.

3 Advantages of this Building Block » Convenient access for students. » List is available regardless of whether instructor uses Blackboard. » Students only see textbooks for the courses in which they are enrolled. » Protects the bookstore data. » Ease of transition during Blackboard upgrades.

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5 Textbook Building Block Components » 2 Perl preprocessing scripts and building block: 1 st Perl script: - Processes Excel spreadsheet provided by the bookstore - Makes sure that data is in a form that the next script can use. - Excel spreadsheet contains: isbn #, dept#, course #, sect #.

6 Textbook Building Block Components » 2 nd Perl script: » Reads isbn#, dept #, course #, sect # from processed Excel spreadsheet. » Sends info to Amazon database in batches of 9 at a time. » Retrieves image of book, title, author, publisher from Amazon database. » Stores textbook data in mysql database. » Stores isbn# and bb_crs_key in mysql database.

7 Structure of Building Block META-INFWEB-INFmodule login.jsp bb-manifest.xmlweb.xmlconfig taglibs bbData.tldbbUI.xslbbUI.tld context.xmlMANIFEST.MF

8 Building Block Files » context.xml- create a jdbc container to connect to mysql database » manifest.mf- not necessary, but many building blocks have them » web.xml- defines the location of the tag libraries » bb-manifest.xml- basically defines the building block metadata, must be absolutely correct or the building block will not install » jsp files- the actual building block scripts

9 login.jsp » Get the ID of the user that logged in. » Get the courses that user is enrolled in. » Compare dept, course, section, and term to Bb course_key. » Get textbook info from mysql database and display it with regular html in the module.

10 Lessons Learned » Collaboration between departments requires persistence. » The basic structure of building blocks can easily be adapted for multiple projects. » Manipulating sample code is more productive than reading the manual.

11 Questions? For further information, please Thank You!