Is it Possible to Export All Course Quizzes En Masse?

Is it Possible to Export All Course Quizzes En Masse?

by Joseph Wilde -
Number of replies: 8

I was recently brought in as part of a company's Continuing Education department, where I'll ultimately be helping them to create new content and be an administrator for a different Learning Management System. In the meantime, I'm working with them to migrate all of their courses (about 134 total) from Moodle to that new LMS. Unfortunately, the current courses were all built into Moodle piecemeal as opposed to being in SCORM packages, as the new LMS requires.

I've been evaluating different authoring tools, and may end up using Captivate primarily for its ability to easily import Moodle's GIFT-format quiz questions. I was able to successfully export questions from a single course and properly import them into Captivate. Is it possible, though, to somehow export our entire catalog of course questions at once (instead of having to go in course-by-course)?

I was previously able to backup all of our courses and use a Python script to extract a lot of the course assets out of those backups. Using that process, though, all of the quizzes appear to come out in .XML format.

This is my first experience with Moodle (or any LMS, for that matter), so I apologize if I'm missing something simple. I've tried to due my due diligence in searching through the help documents and forums, but the only information I've seen has been for exporting the questions from individual quizzes. Also, I wasn't sure if this question was most appropriate for the 'Quiz' section of the forums, or for the 'Backup and Restore' section. Sorry if I made the wrong call. We're running Moodle version 2.9.8+

Thanks in advance!   smile

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In reply to Joseph Wilde

Re: Is it Possible to Export All Course Quizzes En Masse?

by Emma Richardson -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

I think that you should be able to access the quiz bank from the system level and select all categories there to export.

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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Is it Possible to Export All Course Quizzes En Masse?

by Joseph Wilde -

Hey Emma-- thanks for the response! The only place that I've seen any sort of option to export questions is when I've pulled up a specific course, where the 'Export' feature then appears under the 'Question Bank' option on the left.

When I go to export, I am given several 'Export category' options, including a 'Default for System' option under a 'System' heading. I'm assuming that's what you're referring to?

Trying to export with that option, I am given an 'Error' page with the message 'No questions were found that could be exported. Make sure that you have selected a category to export that contains questions.'

This may have to do with how the questions were originally loaded into Moodle, which was long before my time and is something that I'm a bit confused about. It seems that the same 'Export category' options come up regardless of which course I'm on, and if I'm understanding the information correctly then it seems to imply that there are only 52 questions available, being pulled from 2 specific courses. This can't be accurate, though, as we have around 134 courses and they all have 10 or more unique quiz questions (nothing is shared between courses as far as I've seen, nor should it be). I'm attaching a screenshot to demonstrate what I mean.

Any insight you can give me would be greatly appreciated!

Attachment Moodle Question Export Before Looking at Final Quiz.jpg
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In reply to Joseph Wilde

Re: Is it Possible to Export All Course Quizzes En Masse?

by Emma Richardson -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Sorry, it looks like you are correct - I was thinking that you could export the whole site bank at once but it does not appear that you can.  I used to have all my questions at the site level but I realize that once they are at the course level you can only access them from the course...the quesion bank is a very complex animal!

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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Is it Possible to Export All Course Quizzes En Masse?

by Joseph Wilde -

Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification. I was hoping that I was just missing the way to easily extract everything at once, but it sounds like no such luck! 

Again, this may also be a shortcoming of how someone at our company previously built all of our quiz questions, as opposed to a shortcoming of Moodle.


¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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In reply to Joseph Wilde

Re: Is it Possible to Export All Course Quizzes En Masse?

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

If you ahve taken a backup, then the backup contains all the questions in each course.

Yes, they are in an XML format. However, all the data in a Moodle backup is in XML format.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Is it Possible to Export All Course Quizzes En Masse?

by Joseph Wilde -
Ultimately, I'm looking for a way to avoid having to go through and manually re-build all of our quiz questions into a new system. 


I haven't yet seen any SCORM authoring tools that allow for direct import of questions in XML format, nor have I seen any extraneous tools to convert XML format questions into something that can be imported (such as GIFT format, which Captivate will accept, or an XLS or TXT file that Articulate Storyline or Quizmaker will accept).


So, unfortunately, I don't believe that having the questions in XML format does me much good?

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Is it Possible to Export All Course Quizzes En Masse?

by Daniel Thies -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

If you wanted you could import all to the xml files into a single Moodle course or system category and then export that into a big GIFT file. You could also copy the whole database and use an SQL statement to change the context of each category to move all the questions into one course and the export to GIFT.

However, I am not sure why you would want to have all the questions in one big pile. GIFT does not store category information so you would not know which question goes with what quiz. It would seem more rational to convert each quiz into a SCORM package individually.

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In reply to Daniel Thies

Re: Is it Possible to Export All Course Quizzes En Masse?

by Joseph Wilde -

Thanks for the thoughts, Daniel-- I wouldn't have considered those options.

You're right that I need things to be organized by individual course quizzes, though, as opposed to one giant data dump. I was hoping that there might be a way to easily export all of our course quizzes in GIFT format in one fell swoop (or with one fell click), and still have them be broken up by courses, as opposed to manually going course-by-course and exporting the question banks one at a time. It wouldn't be a big deal if it was just a handful of courses, but with about 136 I'm looking for any efficiencies I can find.

Sorry if I wasn't clear about that.

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