Blackboard migration

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"

Some of my questions were as follows:

1. Do you have to create a new course?

• • Aparent answer: YES. Personally, I found this very counter-intuitive, as "importing a course" or "restore from backup" or other similar administrative tasks seem to me to be on a level outside a specific course. For example, having the "Restore" feature only available in the admin tools for a particular course makes it seem like the restoration will only work for that course -- but that is not true. You can use any course's "Restore" link in the admin tools and choose "Create a New Course" mid-way through the retoration procedure. But creating a new course from backup that has nothing to do with the course in which one has clicked the "Restore" link is, like I said, counter-intuitive. And, to top it off, I could find no mention of this until I had already clicked on "Restore". Looks like I need to add some information to the "administrative tools" or "backup/restore" docs, hm? :)

1. Is there a specific "Bb-to-Moodle" conversion tool?

• • Answer: NO. Unlike the WebCT-to-Moodle conversion, [which requires a specific add-on], Bb conversion is now built in.

1. What format does the Bb export have to be in?
2. What versions of Bb and Moodle will this work for?
3. There is a tool floating around called "[Blackboard Content Conversion Tool (CCT)]" that sounds useful for converting Bb to Moodle. Do I need it?

• Answer: NO. Actually, I had a bunch of questions about that tool, too, but ultimately I did not need it.
  • Does the CCT run on the server where Bb is running?
  • Does it interact, somehow, directly with the Bb instance?
  • Or does it run on the Moodle server and do the import from Bb into Moodle?

1. Others...

See also

• Using Moodle Migrate a course from Blackboard to Moodle forum discussion