Weekday Teams reminders for your Blackboard grading backlog

Every weekday at 4pm, sweep the current term's Blackboard gradebook for work that is still waiting to be graded, then send each instructor a private Microsoft Teams message covering only their own backlog. Use a cron trigger: Blackboard does not send outgoing webhooks when a submission lands, so the sweep happens inside the run rather than being event driven.

Start in Blackboard with Get Courses to list the courses running in the current term. For each course, use Get Grade Columns to walk the gradebook, then Get Column Attempts on each column and keep only the attempts whose status is NeedsGrading. NeedsGrading is a first-class Blackboard status, so filter on it directly rather than inferring a backlog from a missing score.

Use Get Course Memberships on each course to find whoever is enrolled in the instructor role, and Get User to resolve that membership into a name and email address. If a course is team taught, send the same backlog to each instructor. If a course has no instructor of record, skip it and note it at the end of the run so somebody can fix the enrollment.

Group the attempts by instructor and age each one by the number of days between submission and today. Sort oldest first. Measure each attempt against a five business day turnaround commitment, excluding weekends, and call out anything past it explicitly. Use judgement about what leads: a three week old final project matters more than a practice quiz submitted yesterday, so weigh both how long something has been waiting and how much the assignment actually counts toward the grade.

For each instructor's message, open with the total outstanding count per course so they can see the shape of the problem in one line. Then list the attempts oldest first, each with the student, the assignment, the course, and how many days it has been waiting, marking anything past the five business day commitment. Keep the whole thing short enough to read on a phone, and write it as a nudge a busy person will act on rather than a data dump.

Send with the Microsoft Teams Create Chat Message action. The Teams chat ID for each instructor needs to be supplied as configuration, a simple mapping of instructor email to chat ID, because there is no way to look up an existing one to one chat from an email address alone. If an instructor has no chat ID mapped, skip them and report it at the end of the run. If the institution would rather have a single visible post than per instructor DMs, use Create Channel Message against a department channel instead and group the body by instructor.

Skip instructors whose backlog is empty and do not send them an all clear. The reminder earns its place by being true every time it arrives: receiving one always means there is something waiting.

One operational note. Blackboard allows roughly 10,000 API requests per day per site, shared across every application, and walking every column of every course is the expensive part of this run. Scope the sweep to the current term, follow the paging links until each list is exhausted, and skip columns that cannot hold attempts, such as calculated or manual entry columns, so the daily sweep stays comfortably inside the quota.