I see the format I used years ago and to replace it will take about 40 hours of work if I do it that way I did it back then.
I have the questions/answers from the vendor in three formats: BlackBoard, MS Word, and XML Angel. Will any of these work in Moodle or do I have to reformat the MS Word again?
This is a right pain Steve, but I have been writing my questions as best I can in my test Moodle and then backing them up, using the backup when I want them in my current production site. (I move around a lot.) I used to convert everything I could to the GIFT format and use that to upload, but from memory, that did not always work, which is why I now use my test Moodle.
Also, doesn't BB have an option to convert questions to GIFT or similar? Using the find/replace in Word should help save a lot of time and saving the file in a txt format for conversion to a csv file should complete it. Alternatively, can work save a file in an XHTML format? XML Angel is new to me, but Moodle does have a builtin XML Format file handling capability that can be used for quizzes. Also, xml, xhtml and csv files can be opened in something like NotePad++ which also has an excellent find/replace function to convert questions to GIFT.
I suspect that whatever you do, it is still going to take some time to complete. "To convert or re-write, that is the question"... up to you unless someone else has a better idea or can provide an option.
I have had good luck with the blackboard format. However sometimes I do need to take the questions into a real blackboard and then export them as XML.
Just checked. I believe that I export to a zip file in blackboard, then import into Moodle using a blackboard format.
I went to the University to run Blackboard so that I can import/export as suggested. That is when I noted a Moodle option to import the questions using Blackboard files. Is this a change that I was not made aware? It was right there in the list and when I tried it, it worked.
Two clicks, a matter of seconds.
I ran a test quiz and it worked.
Am I the first, or last, to see this?
Steve, you are probably the last to see this since this feature has been there forever. (Well, at least around 10 years when I first began using Moodle.) But this is life around Moodle, you stumble across a great and useful feature that you never knew about.
The only thing that I have noticed over the years is that sometimes these Blackboard zip files will not import into Moodle. This is where I import the zip file into Blackboard, then re-export it from Blackboard. Then they work!
12 years ago (omg...) the only thing I had as a question bank was a text file of 400 questions. I did the finger calisthenics to bring it up to GIFT format and that bank lasted me all these time until this year when they significantly re-wrote the book. Up until now, all they did was edit the introduction, rewrite a few examples, renumber the ages, put a new picture on the cover only to charge the student for a "new" edition.
I was afraid that I would have to go through the same thing but this vendor has a few versions of the resource available. This time it is three clicks and five seconds per chapter. It certainly beats creative use of search/replace and about 40 hours of editing. I had so much spare time on my hands back then....