Try at your own risk!
I've been messing with getting question pools from Blackboard into Moodle. Here is my feeble attempt to do that. Try this out and let me know what you think.
Installation notes:
1. Download attached blackboard.zip.
2. Make a backup of custom.php (in moodle/mod/quiz/format directory).
3. Move blackboard.zip into moodle/mod/quiz/format and unzip. You should see a new file xmlize.inc and my custom.php file.
4. You will need to compile xml features into php if you have not already.
Usage notes:
1. Question Pools exported from Blackboard are zipped. I do not have the zip features compiled in my php, hence my custom.php script does not process the zipped file so you'll have to unzip the pool and upload the res00000.dat file. (I have put in code to handle a zipped file, but have not tested it. Feel free to mess with this.)
Implementation notes:
1. I overloaded readquestions and did not make use of the readquestion function. I found with the xml format it was easier to parse all the questions in the file than to separate out each question.
2. To parse the xml I made use of xmlize, which I did not write. Ideally we could add the code from xmlize.inc into the lib.php file. I'm not sure how xmlize is licensed so I'll have to check into this.
3. If this works, I guess we should rename my custom.php file as blackboard.php and make Blackboard one of the import options.
Lessons Learned:
1. It would be nice to have a "delete selected" button at the bottom of the question list for each category. I found myself needing to delete multiple questions from a category. One at a time can be tedious. Maybe even a way to delete an entire category of questions would be nice.
2. It would also be nice to have the "question pool" management separate from the quiz creation. For example, I had to create a new quiz or edit an existing quiz just to upload questions. It seems natural to want to add questions to a pool, yet not want to create a quiz.
At any rate, your testing, comments and/or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Scott