- 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 completed a rewrite (June 26th, 2001) that only uses ASP.
- Can we get a copy?
- I'm happy for you to use the service here, but the rewrite I refer to above enables me to release the source code, which I am now doing under my Scripts License.
Download the source code here.
The bottom line is that I'm happy for you to take and use my work, but if you find bug fixes and improvements, please send them my way. To facilitate this I've set up a list at Yahoo!Groups. You can join it below. I'll probably also use it to make more general announcements, e.g. availability issues.
- XML-RPC Interface
- This is one only programmers could love, so if you've no idea what xml-rpc
is (http://www.xmlrpc.com/), ignore this.
Here's the info for the programmers.
url: http://www.wcc.vccs.edu/services/blackboard/xmlrpcGenerateQuiz.asp
function: generateQuiz
two input parameters: input text in appropriate format and either "BB4" or
"BB5"
returns: url of .zip file and number of questions in a two-item array
- Who?
- David Carter-Tod - I'll let my homepage do the talking, but I'm the Instructional Technologist and webmaster at Wytheville Community College in Southwest Virginia.
