Customizing the My Blackboard (WebCT) Course List with Greasemonkey
Where I teach, we have Blackboard (WebCT) CE 8.
Having used WebCT elsewhere, I had noticed that at other colleges I could hide the courses that appeared in my course list. In the example shown below, notice the pencil icon in the top right corner of the course list and the message in red stating that 33 links had been hidden.
At my school, they have apparently elected to disable this feature. Instead, we see dozens of courses, often with meaningless names like "CSST-1101 - CSST-1101-001 1" which tell us nothing about when the course was offered. Without the ability to hide courses, we have no apparent means of removing courses that were offered in the past.
Greasemonkey is a Firefox plugin that uses JavaScript to modify the contents of webpages after they have been loaded into the browser. I wrote a Greasemonkey script that customizes the items in the My Blackboard Course List, hiding items or changing their appearance, depending on my needs.
Here is a before and after image of my Course List.
The biggest challenge was trying to figure out how to access the proper frame, since Blackboard has two framesets, one nested in the other. The script may be a little rough, but it has been an immense time saver.
// ==UserScript== // @name WebCT Courses // @namespace http://{url removed} // @include http://{url removed}/*/populateMyWebCT.dowebct // ==/UserScript== window.addEventListener ( 'load', function() { var allAnchors=top.frames[0].frames[1].document.getElementsByTagName('a'); for(var i=0;i<allAnchors.length;i++) { // course titles I want to hide if (allAnchors[i].text == 'CSIT-1390 - CSIT-1390-001 1') allAnchors[i].parentNode.style.display = "none"; // course titles I want to modify if (allAnchors[i].text == 'CSWT-2620 - CSWT-2620-002') allAnchors[i].innerHTML = '<strong style="color: red;">Fall 2009 CSWT2620</strong>'; } }, true );