Weekly Blackboard course readiness audit before term starts

Every Monday at 7am during the weeks leading up to a new term, audit every Blackboard course shell for that term and tell each instructor what is still missing before students arrive.

Start with Blackboard Get Terms to identify the upcoming term, the one whose start date is nearest in the future, and work out how many days remain until it begins. Then use Get Courses to pull every course in that term. Blackboard list endpoints page through results with offset and limit and return paging.nextPage, so walk every page rather than stopping at the first one.

For each course, run the readiness checks. Use Get Contents to see whether a syllabus or any posted material exists. Use Get Grade Columns to confirm there are graded items and that they carry points possible. Use Get Course Announcements to look for a welcome post. Use Get Course Memberships together with Get Course Roles to confirm someone with an instructor role is actually assigned. Also read the course availability flag to see whether the shell is still hidden from students.

Skip sandbox and template shells that have no enrolled students. Those are not real sections and should never generate an email.

Resolve each instructor's email address with Blackboard Get User. Send one Gmail Send a Message per instructor that covers all of their courses at once. List only the specific gaps you found rather than repeating a generic checklist, so an instructor missing nothing but a welcome announcement sees exactly that and nothing else. Keep the tone friendly, and let it grow more urgent as the term start date gets closer. Never email an instructor whose courses are all ready.

Post a single ranked rollup to the online learning team's channel with Slack Bot, ordered by days until term start and then by number of gaps. Name only the courses still missing something, so the instructional design team knows where to focus. Post one message for the whole audit, not one per course.

A note on the API: Blackboard versions its endpoints per resource, so the courses collection is v3 while gradebook columns are v2 and most other resources are v1. The default quota is 10,000 requests per 24 hours per site and this audit fans out several reads per course, so use the fields parameter to trim responses and keep the audit scoped to the single upcoming term.