Enroll new student intake form responses in Blackboard

Whenever a new response lands on our student intake Google Form, create the student in Blackboard and enroll them automatically. Trigger the workflow on a new Google Forms response and read the submission with List Responses to pull out the student's full name, email address, student ID, and the course code they are joining.

Next, check whether that person already has a Blackboard account. Call Get Users and look them up by the email address from the form. Blackboard IDs accept secondary ID prefixes, so pass emailAddress:<the address from the form> instead of trying to guess the internal _123_1 primary key. If a matching user comes back, reuse it. If nobody matches, call Create User with the student's given and family name, their email address, the student ID as the external ID, and a username derived from the local part of the email. Creating a user who already exists returns a 409 conflict on the duplicate external ID, which is exactly what the lookup is there to prevent, so never call Create User without checking first.

Enroll the student with Create Course Membership. Address the course as courseId:<the course code from the form> so the human readable code people type on the form works directly, and address the user with the id returned from the lookup or the create step. Set the course role to Student and make the membership available. If Blackboard reports that the membership already exists, treat that as success rather than failing the run, but skip the welcome email in that case so a returning student is not emailed twice. Then call Get Course on the same courseId so the email can use the course's real display name rather than the raw code.

Send the student a welcome message through Gmail with Send a Message. Address it to the email from the form, use a subject along the lines of "You are enrolled in <course name>", and write a short friendly body that greets them by first name, confirms the course they have been added to, tells them where to sign in to Blackboard, and lists two or three first steps: set a password if the account was just created, open the course, and read the syllabus and any announcements. Plain text, no attachments.

Finally, append one row to our student intake log in Google Sheets with Append Values. Record the submission timestamp, student name, email address, student ID, course code, course name, the Blackboard user id, and whether the account was newly created or already existed. Write a row for every response, including the ones that fail.

Two rules to bake in. If the course code on the form does not resolve to a real Blackboard course, skip the enrollment and the welcome email, and still write the log row with the failure reason so someone can follow up. And process each form response exactly once, so no student is ever enrolled or emailed twice. Note that the Blackboard connection needs write access on top of read, because this workflow creates users and memberships.