D’Arcy,

Out of curiosity, can you export a course from BlackBoard into moodle? I was under the impresson, that outside of the Free BlackBoard hack, you couldn’t really port Bb courses, am I wrong? Won;t be the first time, but it is good information to have before I try and bring that LMS giant to its knees

Since Moodle is GPL’d, you’re free to add, or pay to have somebody else add, the functionality you desire. As with any project, there are priorities and roadmaps; perhaps the core developers simply chose to focus their early efforts on other features. Perhaps if the moodle project had the employees and resources of a Blackboard, Inc., your criticism would be slightly more justified. I assume you’ve submitted a feature request or bug report?

@jim: even if Bb doesn’t like to do it natively, there are ways to get the job done.

@todd: the “it’s open source, build it yourself” response doesn’t help the vast majority of Moodle users or administrators. Yes, I could hack the code myself, or pay someone else to hack it. The point wasn’t that it wasn’t possible to add this functionality, but that the app is currently acting as a tar pit. Which is a bit odd, considering the openness of the code and the community. I just filed a bug/feature request on this.

@jimgroom you can’t export a “course” out of…*any* of these systems and get it to work whole hog in any other, because there has never really been an effective standard for doing so (e.g. presuming a course is more than just the “content”- current instructional standards have never addressed things like discussions, assignments or other tools.) More recent things like Common Cartridge, Tools Interoperability and Learning Design all have something to say about interoperability at this higher level of “courses” but right now none of those totally do the job (and the levels of implementaion for these is all over the map)

So D’Arcy here is specifically talking about “course content” and he’s right, currently Moodle does not export course content as either IMS Content Packages or SCORM. Please, please, somebody prove me wrong, because for better or worse, CP is currently the best we’ve got in terms of its support for moving content in and out of these CMS silos. And I have multiple Moodle installations in the province that people hand me “Moodle exports” from and say, there you go, make these work in all the other CMS environments.

To be fair to both Blackboard and WebCT, you can get “modules” out of both as Content Packages. They F%$# around with the spec just enough to make these difficult to re-use simply in other CMS, but it can be made to work.

The 3 lines I’ve always heard from the Moodle camp on this are:
- the pedagogical model that Moodle promotes is such as to not be conducive to encapsulation by the content-centric models of SCORM/IMS CP (I don’t totally buy this but I cede the point partially, it does come at the issue from a different angle let’s say)

- as the commentor above says, if it is important to you, do it yourself, it’s open source (which seems slightly disingenuous, because the same people who say this always oversell the lack of need for technical chops to adopt ‘mature’ open source like moodle with the argument that a big enough community will see you through. Still, he’s not wrong, per se)

- and finally the one I love the most, why would anyone ever want to leave Moodle? And if it’s just a question of moving between Moodle installs, the Moodle export format does the job handily.

What I do find most frustrating, though, about this post is that I’ve been trying to get attention about this for years. It *is* easier to solve the problem by simply saying “well don’t use CMS” which largely seems like the edubloggosphere’s response. I’m not disagreeing with that argument either - content interoperability formats like CP and SCORM are a question that is begged by the existence of the CMS in the first place. Unfortunately for many of us, that is still the reality we have to deal with. The shame is that SOO many people have become partically aware of the issue without really doing anything about it - they’ll even write “SCORM/IMS” into their RFP’s, but then accept vendors word for this or test it so unrigorously that they only realize the pickle they are in once they have to migrate yet again. Sigh. I will end the rant here. If at least post like this raise awareness of the issue (and hopefully, by osmosis at least, the incredible ease of moving content that people like Jim and the COSL folks are consistently demonstrating using other, free, non-CMS open source tools) then that’s a good thing.

@D’Arcy understood, but whining about it doesn’t help either; submitting feature requests/bug reports does. Thank you for taking the time to do so.

I’m in the middle of this very topic now, with our web-based learning application. To be honest we didn’t design SCORM compatibility in from the start because of my doubts as to the medium-term viability of the course-centric, command and control, centralized LMS model. Philosophically, that just isn’t where we’re going.*

Now we’ve just launched our beta, and when I present our decentralized, bottom-up, non-hierarchical, social constructivist approach, everyone applauds and then wants to know about SCORM and moving content into/out of Blackboard. Sigh.

So now we’re looking into how to import and export, and it isn’t trivial. I still don’t believe in the future of the overall LMS model (or, at least how it has been implemented so far). But from a practical standpoint we need to be open, and right now that means SCORM.

* plus it was a big job and we’re tiny ;-).

Wow, Scott, what an awesome comment. So useful for to frame these questions with context, experience, and a solid understanding of both sides. This is enormously useful, so thank you!

I guess if institutions/organizations want to get around this problem, the answer is to develop outside of the CMS and store the content in a object store like Bluestream. D’Arcy, I know you have mucked with that before as did the Open Learning Agency—the process is not an easy one and the benefits are questionable.

Gerry, I’m sorry, but that is the most pie-in-the-sky answer that has NOTHING to do with the actual cottage-model of course creation on campus. This was the whole damn problem with the SCORM learning object model in the first place, is that it came out of an industrial assembly-line model of training that higher ed blindly walked into. Sorry, but I *hate* that answer - for better or worse, one of the reasons the CMS got in the door in the first place was to make putting web courses/content *easier* for individual instructors. To then turn around and say “oh, but if you want to actually have the content be re-used, build it outside” is just so wrongheaded and letting the wrong people off the hook. So is the bullsh*t answer of “well, the CMS was never meant as an authoring environment.” Whatever! Sorry Gerry, I know this is probably meant well (and clearly, the venom in my response is engendered by far far more than your comment, 5 years more of this crap) but this is not the answer.

@gerry: it is possible to author content outside of the LMS and import it, but maintainability is a complete PITA. I would have to teach people how to use the LMS in order to manage the course, how to use the authoring environment (eXe? Lectora? something else?) and how to export content from that, how to import the content into the LMS, and how to update/replace the content when changes are needed.

@scott: I completely agree - one of the most powerful reasons for using any LMS is that it’s so darned *easy* to author content. In fact, it’s so easy that it makes the scenario attractive enough to ignore warts such as proprietary lock-in.

There are definitely ways to move *bits* of content between systems, even just by copy/paste in the worst case scenario, but spending lots of time building stuff in a course only to have it locked in is not an attractive proposition.

LOL - I totally agree with you Scott and D’Arcy. I only said that it was an option and I am glad I am clear of the IMS stuff at this point. Apparently the process works for some people.

ok, glad to hear that Gerry, was worried I may have scared you for life with my last rant “I am glad I am clear of the IMS stuff at this point.” -if only I could say the same, someday I may be as happy as you.

scarred..you know what I meant

Hello, D’Arcy,

Coming late to the conversation — we actually had a similar conversation regarding SCORM at DrupalCon — as Scott points out, the SCORM spec gets abused by most of the implementors who use it to accomplish 2 main things:

1. a checkoff item: we’re SCORM compliant! Wheee!

2. lock in: Our SCORM packages work perfectly within our application. To paraphrase the Moodle argument: why would anybody ever want to leave Blackboard?

The SCORM spec is so unwieldy that a universally clean implementation with sane defaults on errors is pretty unlikely. FWIW, we’re working with the Open Source Labs on writing up a Summer of Code project that will establish clean export of targeted content between Drupal and Moodle — the project spec still needs to get sharpened, and then it’ll need to be accepted as a project, and then we’ll need to get students to code, so we’re a few steps away, but at the very least we’ll have a clean spec that can be used as a starting point for development.

Cheers,

Bill

The SCORM spec is so unwieldy that a universally clean implementation with sane defaults on errors is pretty unlikely.

Agreed. SCORM is just nasty all around. Creating a package that imports into all the different systems out there is a nightmare.

Wasn’t there some concern that IMS-CP runs afoul of Blackboard’s patent, which (for now) has been upheld in court?

The Moodle backup file format is (reasonably) clean XML. I’d guess (with emphasis on the “guess”) that it wouldn’t be too hard to write a script (or maybe even an XSLT transformation) to snarf the data out of it and repurpose it.

D’Arcy - I don’t know much about SCORM, it always left me cold. We’ve had some success with common cartridge. You can get one from openlearn - e.g. http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2969 (scroll down on the left). See if they work.

Hello dnorman,

I just found this interesting explanation about “why Moodle doesn’t export its courses in SCORM”.

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=86092

Soben

[...] been meaning to comment on D’Arcy Norman’s frustrations with not being able to export Moodle courses to a common standard. He makes a very important point: [...]

Hi all, Moodle by default exports to an open XML standard (moodle.xml) with the file system. There is no encryption on this XML export, and anyone is free to write a conversion tool that reads moodle.xml and converts it into another format - as Rolf aptly describes.

Open source projects generally don’t run with large profit margins or capital funding, so new features need to have either a source of funding or a source of development, documentation, and QA resources.

Moodle hasn’t had the benefit of large, open ended grant funding, so larger scale development tends to be very focused on the goals of the funding sources - generally larges institutions like OU, NZVLE, Intel Education, CIE, etc. who need specific functionality added to Moodle on a tightly managed budget and timeline - these projects are more focused on adding more functionality to Moodle than to building export formats - esp. because Moodle’s existing export format is not that hard to read and if need be convert from one XML format to another.

The SCORM format is so limited in it’s ability to support the full range of Moodle (or Blackboard) features that my personal opinion is that building a SCORM export tool would be more of a marketing talking point than an actually useful feature for most people using the LMS- folks would constantly be complaining about all the functionality that can’t supported in the SCORM specification:-(.

If D’Arcy or others can put together a grant or other source of the development resources to build and release a solidly coded and well tested and documented IMS CC export for Moodle, then folks in the Moodle community would be happy to include it - a decent export format would really need to be IMS Common Cartridge, though, IMO.

We in the Moodle development community are really working very hard to give the user community the best LMS we can with the constraints of time and resources - we would love to work on a project to provide a good IMS CC export from Moodle - I’ve been trying for years now with Jason Cole, Jim Farmer, Martin Dougiamas, Martin Langhoff etc. to put together a project to provide IMS CC export for Moodle - the lack of it is not for lack of good faith or desire on the part of the Moodle development community - however it is not a trivial project and generally non-trivial projects need to have a way to provide dedicated resources over the lifetime of the project to be successful.

Michael, thanks for your great response! I never intended to imply any bad faith in the Moodle Dev. community - believe me, I know how hard implementing SCORM is (I implemented SCORM complete with AICC on a commercial LMS a few years ago).

IMS CC does sound like the ideal export/imort/interchange format (and certainly much more flexible and complete than SCORM, by including IMS QI etc…) - but does anything implement that yet? The IMS site for the spec still seems rather draftish. When it goes “live” this summer, things could really get interesting!

Michael, good response, I agree. We’ve talked before about this, I may be in a better position now to collaborate on this (and as you indicate, Common Cartridge is likely the better target anyways). Let’s talk at some point. And if you know of anyone who has done work on *exporting* Moodle content as either CP or CC, would love to hear about that too. Cheers, Scott

By the way, the optional Moodle Book module now has an “Export to IMS CP” button - it is a very nice tool for developing content in, so that may be a good option for moving content from one system to another.

In fact, that makes Moodle itself a nice free tool to develop IMS CP content for other systems:-).

Hi, is there any update on this? I would like to export the latest Moodle forum content for specific courses and echo it in a new system we are building. Can I do this directly via the database?

Me and my team are currently working on the same. And hopefully in a month or so we will release our first version of the Sitact’s SITACTION module where you will be able to export a learning path in from moodle to any other LMS of your choice. It wont be a oneway any more.

Happy Moodling