I am trying to import question bank from a blackboard format. Import works fine; however, after importing it changes the order of questions. In other words, import does not maintain the same order of the questions as in the blackboard file format.
Here is the screen shot after I click on import:
After this I click on continue button and the next screen shows completely different order of questions as shown in the screen shot below:
Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Prefixing question names with a number in bulk is slow and tedious within the Moodle interface, but you could either do it before you import the questions, if the Blackboard import format is plain text, or else export the Moodle questions to a file in text format such as XML and do it afterwards. In the XML file, search for the "<name>" element and then add the number in the "<text>" element below it. For 100 questions, this wouldn't take very long.
<question type="multichoice">
<name>
<text>001. Question name</text>
</name>
If you're feeling brave, and have a lot of questions, you could export to a Word file using the WordTable plugin
, and then auto-number the "Heading 2" styles in Word to add in zero-padded numbers like 001, 002 (cf. Number your headings
). The Heading 2 styles contain the question names. Then run a simple VBA command to convert the generated numbers into text values, see Converting Automatic Numbering to Manual Numbering. This will make the numbers a part of the question name text. Finally, import the questions back into Moodle directly from Word.
This approach is probably only suitable for large batches of questions that don't contain images.
This is very helpful and works. However, I am exploring one additional idea. Moodle has a field called "ID number" which can be used to sort the questions. If I can create an "ID number" field and populate with 001, 002, etc. in the XML file, that would be great. I do not know how to create this field in the blackboard "questions.dat" xml file. Any help would be huge.
See below the screenshot for the ID number field:
I have also included the blackboard.zip file if that is going to be helpful.
Many thanks to everyone for your tremendous help.