Note: You are currently viewing documentation for Moodle 2.3. Up-to-date documentation for the latest stable version is available here: Blackboard migration.

Blackboard migration

From MoodleDocs

A Blackboard content conversion tool is available. It was designed to migrate Blackboard 6.1 to Moodle 1.4+ - it may be possible to make it work with other versions.

According to Michael Penney in the forum discussion Migrating 10000 students from Blackboard to Moodle?

"It works pretty well with a couple of caveats:
1) It doesn't import all Blackboard question types: at CSU H, we wrote an essay question type and a 'rendered match' question type and a BB pool importer, we'd like to work with SF and others to get our qtype importer into theirs.
2) SF's tool is designed to make you think about your course when you import it and redesign it. That is a nice idea, however it can be pretty time consuming when you have hundreds of documents in a course (<rant>Blackboard's poor content development tools encourage what I call the 'datadump' course format, instead of delivering information in an effective elearning tool like Moodle's lesson, with BB folks tend to post hundreds of office documents and then massive quizzes about them</rant>)."

We recently migrated about 200 courses from Blackboard 6 to Moodle 1.5+, and I made a PowerPoint for this routine. I've been asked to make a Captivate just on the import routine and will work on that.

Example Migration of One Test Course

by Jeffrey Silverman, The Johns Hopkins University (Note: I am a novice Moodler. This is a description of what I did to move a single exported BlackBoard course to my out-of-the-box Moodle test installation. I had a number of questions about the process and I hope this example helps answer them for someone else.)

When: This test procedure was performed during the week of 20-Aug-2007

Versions:

  • Moodle 1.8
  • BlackBoard 7.1 "basic" (unconfirmed)
  1. Export course content from Bb. This step was done by someone else! I do not know how to do this, what options were chosen, etc. I do know that I got a .zip file that I think is a "Course Archive".
  2. Import course into Moodle. (Needs to be done by a user with the necessary privileges. I have only one user in my Moodle installation, the "Admin" user, and he (she?) is the "Site Administrator").
    1. Create new course
    2. Go to "Restore" under the course administrative tools
    3. Choose a file to upload; upload the Bb .zip file
    4. Choose "import" -- in another page or two you will get to say to restore this as a "New Course"

So my questions were as follows:

  1. Do you have to create a new course?
  2. Others.... I will update this later after I put out this fire...