OneRoster line items: Creating assignments that are assigned/visible only to certain students

Eric Eskildsen
Eric Eskildsen
Sixth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
in Education Management APIs

We're using OneRoster to sync Google Classroom assignments and scores to Blackbaud gradebooks.

In Classroom, assignments can be assigned to individual students:

bbdf1dd3ba466e0d753a25833193769f-huge-im

Google calls this the assignee mode. In the screenshot, only one student is given the assignment. They'll be the only one that can see it. Google calls this assignee mode individual students. My understanding is that Blackbaud has the same thing.

When creating an assignment programmatically, like through `PUT` `lineItems/{id}`, is there a way to set this?

Comments

  • Stephen Boyle
    Stephen Boyle Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    @Eric Eskildsen
    There is not, beyond manually setting the same student list in both places.
    The main issue is that OneRoster does not support assignments for only some and not all students. And while there is a way to send that data in a metadata object, Google Classroom doesn't include that data in what they send out.

    If they update their PUT lineItem call to include it, we could then consume it. But it would be specific to only GC and BB. Each other LMS (like Canvas) would have to write up special code to handle it, too.

  • Eric Eskildsen
    Eric Eskildsen
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @Stephen Boyle Hi Stephen, thanks for the reply.

    In this case, Google Classroom isn't the one sending the PUT requests. We're generating them ourselves. We read from the Classroom API, create PUT requests for the assignments and scores, and send them to Blackbaud.

    The flow looks like this:

    Google Classroom API → Custom code → OneRoster PUT Requests → Blackbaud

    The Classroom API includes the assignee mode. So, we have the data we need from the Classroom side. But it sounds like Blackbaud's OneRoster implementation doesn't ingest it, if I'm understanding correctly.

  • Stephen Boyle
    Stephen Boyle Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    @Eric Eskildsen
    True. It's not supported by OneRoster. And we haven't added a BB-proprietary version to our version of the OneRoster PUT. It is in my backlog to research/implement, but not for the immediate future, sorry.

Categories