Oh yes I think everybody is confused and searching for messages asking for help in these forums clearly show that many moodle users are confused. I will write what I know, please if I made any mistake, people knowing better can correct me.
As we "all know" Blackboard is a LMS and Blackboard people defined several formats to import questions in it. I don't think they were really interested in exporting questions from it, apart to claim compliancy to standards like IMS-QTI
I don't know anything on recent formats but there are 2 widerly used "blackboard formats"
Similarities
- all files are zipped
- there is a manifest.xml
- questions are in files with names like res00000.dat, res00001.dat
- images are in a folder hierarchy
Differences
- the manifest.xml dont have quite the same structure
- the folder hierarchy for the images is not the same
- in the manifest.xml res00000.dat, res00001.dat files are not declared of the same type, in one case they are declared of type "assessment/x-bb-qti-test" and in the other "assessment/x-bb-pool". Maybe we can call them the QTI type and the POOL type ?
- as can be expected from the previous point, the structure of the *.dat files is completely different between POOL type and QTI type
Several vendors have used these formats to produce questions generators and questions banks for teachers
- TestGen (current version : 7) distributed by Pearson produce the QTI type variant when you choose to export as "Blackboard 6.x-9.x". Pearson also distribute ready made TestGen banks for teachers using their books.
- Examview (current version : 7.5) distributed by eInstruction produce the POOL type variant but I know nearly nothing about examView as it is a product I can't afford, I have only worked for examples files people have send to me. apparently a lot of book's editors produce questions banks in ExamView format for teachers.
For "historical reasons" I think, import of these 2 types of files has always been separated in Moodle. It has been suggested (MDL-9408) to unify this in one unique import format, wich would prevent users from choosing the wrong one, and then complaining in the forums that import is broken.
This would be quite possible as parsing the manifest.xml file we can extract the type of the *.dat files and use the appropriate code to extract questions.
Unfortunately, I have not yet searched the web to find reference documents describing these format, but I have read several times people saying that in fact both ExamView and TestGen don't produce "real" blackboard files, but only files that blackboard is able to import wich is not quite the same thing ! We all know that standard compliancy is often not as good as it should, so I decided when I began investigating this problem to work from real ExamView and TestGen files rather than use the standard description.
Maybe blackboard_six can be described as a format that can import the QTI blackboard files made by TestGen
And the examview_bbsixplus as a format that can import the POOL blackbord files made by examview ?
