Luther College
is a modestly-sized (2,500 FTE students) mid-western USA private college using
Blackboard 5.5 for about 3-1/2 years. For the past 1-1/2 years we've been
looking seriously at the open source community of CMS and have selected Moodle
as the leading contender. A major critical success factor for this project is
the ability to accurately convert Blackboard course data to Moodle, allowing
for instructors to bring their desired courses along with them on the
conversion road. We have spent great amounts of time researching and reading
these forum posts and have determined to initiate a formal course data
conversion project in collaboration with Linuxbox, a leading provider of
outsourcing services targeted at the higher education marketplace.
The logistical approach we have chosen is fairly simple:
- Courses converted upon request of instructor by CMS administrative personnel
- Not all Blackboard course data will be converted (for example, forum topics will, but forum threads will not)
- There will be an understanding between the instructor and CMS administrative personnel that some additional work may be required of the instructor in order to place their course material in locations as desired.
The technical approach we have chosen was inspired by Jason Cole of San Francisco State University and details as follows:
- Blackboard exports in IMS 1.1 XML format will be processed by one XSLT 1.0 file which will output a Moodle XML backup file. A wrapper script will initiate the xml conversion and gather the course documents into a zip file. Restoring of the converted course to Moodle will complete the conversion.
- Standard institution-specific information will be contained within the configuration of the Moodle into which the course is being imported.
- Rather than the JAVA wrap used by Jason and his staff, we have chosen a PHP wraparound which uses the Sablotron XSLT processor to better integrate into Moodle should this code ever be placed into CVS.
The current status of this project is
exploration/proof-of-concept. We have successfully converted basic Blackboard
course information as well as course documents and forum topics using the XSLT
methods described above. We have prepared a requirements definition and
detailed design specification showing what will be done with what piece of
information and are ready to engage the enemy.
We invite input and collaboration from all who are interested in this approach
with a humble realization that this type of effort has been attempted numerous
times with mixed results. For our part, we make the following commitment:
- We will communicate frequently with this forum and also make formal updates on the progress being achieved in this endeavor at intervals not to exceed every two weeks.
- Alongside that, we will make the most current operational version of this conversion program available at intervals not to exceed every two weeks.
The current version of the program can be found at our Moodle test site (logon as "guest":
http://testmoodle.luther.edu/moodle/course/view.php?id=23&edit=off
Regards
