Margin and Blackboard — how the calendar feed works

Margin supports Blackboard through connected through the iCal calendar feed your school publishes, added once at setup — you paste your school's calendar feed URL once at setup, and upcoming due dates flow to your Todoist and dashboard. Blackboard publishes that feed itself; the steps are below, from Blackboard's own student Calendar help page.

Finding your feed URL in Blackboard

Open Calendar from the base navigation bar, select the Calendar Settings button, then open the menu beside it and choose Share Calendar. Copy the link — it ends in .ics.

Source: Blackboard's own student Calendar help page, retrieved 2026-08-02. Blackboard calls the feature “Share Calendar”. Vendor interfaces change — if what you see differs, the vendor's own page is the authority, not this one.

Blackboard's help pages moved during the Anthology acquisition: help.blackboard.com now redirects to help.anthology.com, and the current page calls the product “Blackboard LMS”. Older links still work through the redirect.

What Blackboard feeds carry, and what they don't

You can't share calendars for individual courses. When you share your calendar, events for all of your courses appear.

So the feed you paste into Margin covers every course at once. That is the vendor's design, not a Margin limitation.

When you connect your Blackboard LMS calendar to an external calendar, all course events appear one year in the past and into the future.

A full academic year in both directions, so a semester sits well inside the window.

What calendar feeds can and can't carry

In building Margin's feed reader we learned calendar feeds have sharp edges. Here is where ours are, including the one we have not solved.

• All-day events end on an exclusive date. A deadline written as ending on the 5th actually ends at the start of the 5th. Margin reads that the way the spec means it, so an all-day deadline doesn't land a day late.
• Times with no timezone are ambiguous by design. The spec calls these “floating” and leaves them for the reader to interpret. Margin resolves them against your own computer's timezone — the reading the spec intends — and falls back to UTC only if your browser cannot report a timezone at all. Reading floating times as UTC is exactly what used to shift Moodle and D2L exports by your offset: on US Central that was enough to bump a 23:59 deadline onto the next day.
• Repeating events expand, up to a point. Margin expands weekly and daily repeats across the term, so a semester of weekly homework arrives as a semester of weekly homework. Less common patterns — monthly, yearly, and the rarer rules — come through as a single event rather than the whole series.

Why a feed, and not a direct reader

In building Margin we did not find a practical student-facing API for assignment data on Blackboard, so we read the calendar feed your school already publishes — that's what Margin uses.

Schools

Northern Illinois University is beta on Blackboard. Every other Blackboard campus is compatible pending verification.