A Blackboard Assignment Tracker With Reminders and a Real Grade

Course pages, announcements, submission, and grades your instructor chooses to publish. Notifications exist, but they are built to tell you something changed in the platform rather than to prepare your week.

The gaps that matter for planning are consistent across institutions. There is usually no single cross-course view ordered by urgency, no advance reminder you control, and no running weighted grade you can trust unless your instructor configured the gradebook carefully — and many do not.

The grade point deserves emphasis. Whether a Blackboard grade means anything depends on whether categories and weights were set up, whether ungraded work counts as zero, and whether grades are published or hidden. Two courses in the same term routinely differ on all three.

Canvas import is free for everyone, with no limit on how many classes come across. Blackboard and Moodle import is free on every plan. Setup varies meaningfully by institution: Blackboard deployments differ in version, configuration and what integrations the school allows.

Before connecting anything, confirm your institution's policy on third-party access. Some schools permit it, some restrict it, and some prohibit it outright in their acceptable-use terms. If it is not permitted, do not connect — and you have not lost anything, because the syllabus path below covers the same job.

This is stated plainly rather than buried because it is the honest position: the connector's availability is not entirely in the app's control, and a tracker that only works if your school cooperates is not a tracker you should have to gamble on.

• Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle import is free on every plan
• Setup varies by institution and version
• Confirm your school's policy before connecting; if unclear, use the free path

The syllabus usually contains more of what you need for planning than the platform does. Weight percentages, exam dates, the reading schedule and the grading scale live there, and much of that never becomes a Blackboard entry.

Photograph it, upload the PDF, drag it onto the web app, or paste the text — up to 60,000 characters, which is the fastest and most accurate route when you can select the syllabus text on a laptop. You get the course, instructor, meeting times, semester dates, grading scale, and every dated item with its weight.

You can also paste a Blackboard assignment list straight into the same scanner. If you can select the text, it can be read, and no connection or token is involved.

The free plan includes one AI action for the life of the account, unlimited classes synced free from Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle plus one course you add by hand within one semester, one semester total, full deadline tracking, weighted grade tracking and same-day reminders.

Same-day reminders schedule themselves as soon as you approve the extracted dates, at no cost. Pro adds one-day and three-day advance notice.

The reason to care about advance notice is the size of the work, not preference. A short discussion post is fine with a morning-of nudge. A paper that needs six hours is not — by the time you are reminded, the only available response is to start late.

Because reminders are derived from the dates rather than configured per item, they survive the thing that kills hand-built reminder systems: nobody has to remember to set them.

Semora computes the weighted sum of your scores divided by the weight you have attempted, not by the full semester's weight. That keeps the number meaningful mid-term, when an ungraded final worth 30 percent would otherwise drag it toward zero.

It supports the structure syllabi actually use: categories with their own percentages, drop-lowest rules per category from 0 to 20 that never remove your last remaining grade, three different extra-credit policies, and letter grades from your course's scale. All of that is on the free plan.

Editing the letter cutoffs to match your institution's scale, and the what-if calculators that tell you what you need on the rest, are Pro.

If you do connect, the behaviour on refresh matters more than the behaviour on first import, because that is where trackers quietly corrupt a semester.

A re-sync refreshes an item's title and dates in place. It does not touch your completion state, the scores you entered, or subtasks you added. Something you marked done stays done.

That is the single most useful thing to test in any tool you are evaluating: move a date, re-sync, and check that the item updated rather than duplicating, that the reminder follows the new date, and that your completions survived.

If your instructors post everything to Blackboard with accurate dates and your institution publishes a weighted grade you check and trust, a tracking layer is redundant. Use the platform.

If you need to submit work or message an instructor, that stays in Blackboard regardless. This is an organizing layer on top, not a replacement for the LMS.

And if your institution prohibits third-party connections and you would rather not scan syllabi either, then the honest answer is that this is not for you — the value here depends on the data getting in by one route or the other.