Follows the same authentication flow as logging in from a browser. Fiddler was used to reverse engineer the requests and translate to Python.
- Compatible with Python 2.7+ and 3.x
- The only non-standard library required is
requests:
pip install requests
Edit main.py and fill in values for UARK_EMAIL and UARK_PASSWORD. Alternatively, the script can be run directly with:
python main.py "<uark email address>" "<uark password>"
i.e.
python main.py "johndoe@uark.edu" "thisisprobablynotmyrealpassword"
The file examples.py contains 3 examples of API usage:
- Listing Courses
- Checking Course Grades
- Checking Course Content and Downloading Attachments
The script can be run the same way as above:
python examples.py "<uark email address>" "<uark password>"
Blackboard REST API documentation
Blackboard Github
The paths from the documentation are combined with the UARK blackboard URL, for example: https://learn.uark.edu/learn/api/public/v1/announcements
If you are logged into Blackboard in a browser, some of the simple routes can be accessed. More examples:
There is a lot of other things that can be done based on a user's level of access and currently enrolled courses.
I wanted to get programmatic access to the Blackboard API to see if I could automate some things, like downloading course materials. As far as I can tell, the only other way to get access to this API is by creating a developer application and having a UARK Blackboard system administrator create a REST API integration.
- Even with 2FA enabled on my account this script did not trigger any additional authentication steps, even when logging in from a different IP.
- This works as of January 2021 but any changes in either UARK's or Microsoft's authentication process could break the script.
- The content data seems incomplete and I couldn't figure out how to access some attachments that I know exist but weren't returned by the API.