Blackbird

I built Blackbird solo while working as the teaching and admin assistant for an independent tutor running online classes as BioHelix Tutoring. It grew straight out of the operational grind I dealt with every week: chasing payments, tracking attendance, and answering the same questions over and over.

Getting paid was the worst of it: a payment request went out by hand after every lecture, and each link expired within 24 hours. Worse, a student opening the link once invalidated it before a parent could actually pay.

With two lectures a week across 225 students, that meant roughly 450 payment links sent by hand every single week. On top of that, none of the billing was trustworthy without knowing exactly who had attended.

A singular source of truth was needed to drive the system forward: attendance.

Once courses were created in Blackbird, they were linked to weekly Microsoft Teams meetings. Using scheduled tasks, Blackbird pulled the attendance record for each meeting through the Teams API and marked who showed up.

At the end of each month, Blackbird invoiced every student automatically through Stripe and regional payment processors, based on the lectures they had actually attended.

With this, we'd solved two problems at once: the tutor and myself were no longer sending individual payment requests one at a time, and, thanks to the switch to Stripe invoicing, none of the invoices were invalidated by students opening the link without intending to pay.

Quizzes and assignments lived in Google Classroom, built on Google Forms, and their grades synced automatically into the Blackbird gradebook. Once a week, and again at the end of each month, Blackbird compiled attendance, recordings requested, and grades into a report emailed to both students and parents.

For admins and tutors, Blackbird provided a full audit log of everything that happened.

It also quieted the steady stream of “what's my grade?”, “was I marked present?”, and “can I get the recording?” The reports already answered them.

Blackbird was archived when BioHelix wound down online teaching as pandemic restrictions lifted.