My school uses Blackboard, a learning management system (LMS). Basically, an LMS lets instructors and students have an online place to exchange information—instructors post announcements, syllabi, and readings; students drop off files for assignments; everybody discusses class topics in discussion boards.

It would be so lovely (for me, at least, and I suspect for others) if there were RSS feeds for the announcements and discussion boards. But there aren’t.

I’m expected to check my courses’ Blackboard sites regularly for information from my instructor. Some of my classes require me to post to discussion boards on a topic and respond to other students’ comments. It would be super if I could get these things the same way I get all the other often-updated websites I monitor 342 times a day, but I can’t. I have to click, type, login, click, etc. to get to a butt-ugly website with the announcements instead of it automagically appearing in my pretty and elegant newsreader (Sage with a Safari-like skin).

I’m half of a mind to write something to screen-scrape the Blackboard pages to get the announcements, but IANAP and I feel that beating that into submission would probably take precious time away from what I’m actually supposed to be learning.