Problem: Links to courses that are open to unauthenticated guests bring visitors to the login page, rather than directly to the course.
Solution: While there is no fix for this yet, Bb has provided a workaround while we are researching a solution. This workaround is as follows, however users can also simply browse to the “Guest Access” link on the login page, and search for the course by name or ID.
- When building the URL, start with the guest access link. This logs them in as “guest” automatically: https://bb.uvm.edu/webapps/login?action=guest_login&new_loc=
- The “new_loc=” variable allows you to add any in-system link, starting with “/Webapps” etc. For example, the relative path to the course with the ID 12345 looks something like this: /webapps/blackboard/execute/modulepage/view?course_id=_12345_1&cmp_tab_id=_4741_1&mode=view
- However the link after the new_loc= variable MUST BE ENCODED! Use a service like http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ to encode the link like so: %2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Fmodulepage%2Fview%3Fcourse_id%3D_12345_1%26cmp_tab_id%3D_4741_1%26mode%3Dview
- So the full link would be: https://bb.uvm.edu/webapps/login?action=guest_login&new_loc=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Fmodulepage%2Fview%3Fcourse_id%3D_12345_1%26cmp_tab_id%3D_4741_1%26mode%3Dview
You can change the PK1 number of the course (above indicated as 12345) to whatever course you want. You can also start with a different relative path, i.e. to link to the announcements area you’d start with this in steps 2 & 3:
/webapps/blackboard/execute/announcement?method=search&context=course&course_id=_12345_1&handle=cp_announcements&mode=cpview