Blackboard migration

Blackboard systems

The way Blackboard and WebCT named their products is confusing!

For the purpose of migration to Moodle, Blackboard can be categorised into 3 different systems, each with a different migration procedure.

• CE 4.0/CE 4.1 (rebranded WebCT)
• Standard Blackboard (5.5, 6, 7)
• Vista3/Vista4/Vista8 and CE 6/CE 8 (rebranded WebCT)

CE 4.0/CE 4.1

CE 4.0, 4.1(rebranded WebCT) can use the webctimport tool with the "IMS Content Migration Utility" here: https://docs.moodle.org/en/WebCT_migration

Standard Blackboard

• Moodle has a restore function built into the standard backup/restore process which will restore Blackboard Archive/Export files with mixed results
• An Alternative solution is to use the LSU converter here: http://moodleconverter.lsu.edu/ (code available here: https://xythos.lsu.edu/users/pcali1/moodlecct/index.html) see discussion here: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=147948#p647029
  • Note: Archive/Export files from Windows-based Blackboard servers are not handled correctly by MoodleConverter (see discussion here: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=147348) but the archives can be reformatted with minimal effort (more details will soon be posted or linked here, but the essence of the process is to unzip the archive file, rename certain files with Blackboard-encoded file names, and then zip the archive file on a Linux-style [forward-slash] file system)
• A new LSU Converter is available here: https://xythos.lsu.edu/users/rrusso/cct2.zip see discussion here: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=147948#p647029

Moodle Course Restore

From Moodle 1.5 onwards, Moodle's "course restore" facility can import courses from Blackboard 5.5 and 6.0 -- you have to use the 'export' facility in BB to get the files in the correct format from BB. For question pools, there is a dedicated import facility in the Quiz Module.

There's a screen-by-screen walk-through by Matt Campbell - he says:

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.

For the above to work, you will need to have the XSLT and Sablotron extensions.

Some question types are not supported by Moodle directly -- see below for contrib question types that add that support.

For Moodle 1.4.x 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>)."

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)

Procedure

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 "Restore" (in the Action column) -- in another page or two you will get to say to restore this as a "New Course"

Questions

Some of my questions were as follows:

1. Do you have to create a new course?
   1. 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? :)
2. Is there a specific "Bb-to-Moodle" conversion tool?
   1. Answer: NO. Unlike the WebCT-to-Moodle conversion, [which requires a specific add-on], Bb conversion is now built in.
3. What format does the Bb export have to be in?
   1. The Bb "export" should be an archive of the Bb course, rather than an export; otherwise you can't restore the course because it it missing a name (and possibly other fields).
4. What versions of Bb and Moodle will this work for?
5. There is a tool floating around called "[Blackboard Content Conversion Tool (CCT)]" that sounds useful for converting Bb to Moodle. Do I need it?
   1. Answer: NO. Actually, I had a bunch of questions about that tool, too, but ultimately I did not need it.
      1. Does the CCT run on the server where Bb is running?
      2. Does it interact, somehow, directly with the Bb instance?
      3. Or does it run on the Moodle server and do the import from Bb into Moodle?

Vista CE 6/CE 8

Vista3/Vista4/Vista8 and CE 6/CE 8 unfortunately encrypt their backup files and there isn't currently any open source method to convert the full courses yourself.

• Files for each course can be extracted as a zip then placed inside the new course, however they require manual re-linking
• Quiz questions can be extracted with Respondus and you can create an IMS QTI file to import into Moodle
• Newer versions have some useful Database views inside the Blackboard database that allow retrieving of some of the information. It's really easy to get course names/users/enrolments and grades directly out using the DB Views "RPT_PERSON", "RPT_MEMBER","RPT_LEARNING_CONTEXT" and "RPT_GRADEBOOK"

doing it manually also gives you the forced opportunity for your lecturers/staff to clean things up a bit and learn a bit more about the differences between Blackboard and Moodle

See also

• Final 2009 Report of the University of North Carolina LMS Evaluation Committee describing the results of an evaluative comparison of Moodle with the University’s current Blackboard system (Vista)
• The Open Source Collaborative: Moodle Assessment Report This report is the accumulation of two years of experimentation and evaluation of Moodle by the North Carolina Community Colleges System.
• The Whole Kit and Caboodle on Moodle presentation introducing Moodle and sharing experiences of migrating from Blackboard
• An LMS By Any Other Name... presentation helping transition Blackboard users to Moodle terms
• Blackboard to Moodle resources including a Blackboard 7.3 to Moodle 1.8 Cross-Reference
• Import_questions: Blackboard format
• bFree - Blackboard™ Course Content Extractor - extract selected content from Blackboard Archive/Export files into a local filesystem, allowing them to be cleaned, manipulated, zipped, and uploaded for use in Moodle. This does not create course objects but does transfer the documents and descriptions into a Moodle course's Files for creating resources. This is useful for those faculty who will be reorganizing their courses or for complex courses which don't convert well.

Using Moodle forum discussions:

• Migrate a course from Blackboard to Moodle
• Moodle 1.9 Blackboard Import - contains some troubleshooting
• If you are having problems with Blackboard to Moodle read this
• Examview (Blackboard) Quiz Plugin
• Blackboard archive file name conversion A thread which contains information on hexified Blackboard archive file names (BB archiving converts filenames to hex when they contain spaces)