Exporting Moodle Quizzes to Blackboard

Although the free open source software Moodle has made great strides to be compatible with importing blackboard quizzes and material, the love seems lacking when it comes from trying to take material from a Moodle site and put it on Blackboard.

Part because, I guess the rationale is the folks at blackboard realize that the exorbitant costs of licensing arrangements with their software package do not merit the product, so they probably are shuddering at the thought of people actually ever using moodle, which is very robust, very comparable, and seems to be potentially much more cost effective.  There is the distinct possibility that someone else is using moodle to design course material and suddenly finds themselves in a work environment (aka school, community college, or university) where blackboard is the norm, and the expectations of SACS and/or some similar intra-office politics demand and necessitate the usage of blackboard to convey course material (BOO!)

That’s what prompted me to write an alpha version of a parser utility & some instructions that helps fill in the missing links in going from a pre-existing quiz on a Moodle site, and having it show up on a Blackboard site.

Here’s the basic flow between point a and b.

1) Takes moodle quizzes and export it using the GiFT format from it’s underlying *nix backbones

2) Parse it in a friendly format that windows enjoys(using unix2dos or a similar parsing program and/or routine)

3) Converting the GiFT format to a plain text file that blackboard can import(using moodle2blackboard and/or a similar program)

4) import the quiz into blackboard.

I am excited with the results of sitting in front of my computer today slamming buttons trying to make something to add some cross/back portability the other direction, and plan on posting a link to a utility that will make this possible.

There are some rules and restrictions to make it work, and it’s not quite yet perfected as a process for the feint of heart.

In a nutshell, the steps 1 & 4 are very simple and require no real skill or special steps to make happen.  2 & 3 are where the following issues creep up with Moodle versus Blackboard.

Moodle can export in a variety of formats.

None of these formats are compatible with blackboard.

Blackboard can import plain text files into their engine Respondus

So, we need to bridge the gap.  But before we can do that, we need to realize one of the fundamental differences between the OSS moodle and the Closed Source blackboard — blackboard heavily favors windows style computer installations, while Moodle favors the *nix style installation (primarily unix and linux derivatives)

This wouldn’t be a big deal except the typical text output of a moodle gift file looks sort of like this when you open it with notepad (note: some programs properly handle control codes, however, when you’re parsing a file you got to work within the constraints of your parsers design, and the easier it is to read and sort data, the easier and more consistent results tend to be):

// question: 36 name: ACTH ::ACTH::[html]Adrenocorticotropic Hormone, or ACTH has what major function and is located where?{ ~Adrenal Cortex, circadian rhythms ~Adrenal Medulla, circadian rhythms =Adrenal Cortex, stressor management ~Adrenal Medulla, stressor management}

except tons of freaky little boxes appear and the formatting is even LESS readable than this, where as we probably just want something simple & properly formatted like this example for blackboard:

Title:  Adaptive Defense - Characteristics

1) Which of the following roles best reflect the nature of the adaptive defense system?

a. specificity
b. systemic presence
c. memory
*d. all of the above

The utility to convert multiple choice questions now is stable and works (but only for multiple choice questions) as mentioned, however getting the page formatting correct requires converting the exported text gift file from moodle from unix to dos format.

I’m actually going to keep this close sourced at the moment, however probably any programmer or person on an IT staff should be able to come up with a solution, however, I am also going to probably include some sort of registration aspect to the program and pick a license.  Assuming I could get a few registrations, I’ld be much more motivated to produce add-on functionality (proper parsing of true/false questions, proper conversion of other exported formats, built-in conversion utility to handle the unix2dos conversion, etc.)

That being said, the version I’m going to post will have a limitation of 20 question conversion on unregistered copies, to help motivate people to motivate me through feedback & registration.

Enjoy!  If there aren’t links to the necessary programs are not up yet and you stumble across this draft page post, expect this blurb and the proper file links to be edited&present before Nov 20, 2009 - so feel free to bookmark this page! (control-d)