- Why did you do this?
- Blackboard is a good product, but the quiz generation process is tedious, especially if you're generating a quiz from another product or format. So I wrote some code to make my life easier. Now I've put it on the web as a public service. The payoff in my position is that I can help our faculty create quizzes more easily and more easily do some import and export between courses and from older systems.
- Will it work with...?
- In theory, this should work with ANY learning management system, e.g. WebCT, but I can't vouch for that. I've tested it with Blackboard 4 (Courseinfo) and Blackboard 5. There are other commercial products out there that do similar things and do work with WebCT, e.g.
- Can I use this without asking?
- This is on the web because I'm happy for anyone to use it. You don't need to ask for permission first.
- How did you do this?
- Happily, Blackboard is on board with the IMS Project, and they support an import/export format that is open and understandable. It's written in XML, so with a little digging I was able to discern the XML format for all the question types. Then taking canonical export from Blackboard 4, I substituted new questions into the format, corrected some file sizes and was able to reimport.
My initial approach was to automate this process, using ASP and Frontier, but I've just completed a rewrite (June 26th, 2001) that only uses ASP.
- Who?
- David Carter-Tod - Former Instructional Technologist and webmaster at Wytheville Community College in Southwest Virginia.
|
