How to move your test/quiz items to BlackBoard

BlackBoard (BB) is one of the major content management systems and is often employed as a platform for online or hybrid (partially online) courses. BB has a wide array of interactive instructional features such as virtual classroom using Collaborate Ultra, but it is still common to use traditional assessment (e.g, multiple choice quiz) as part of online instruction. This document introduces procedures for making a large number of online assessment items without interacting with the BB interface.

You can create Test items online on Blackboard, but it's extremely tedious and time-consuming (see this document by Hunter's ICIT for how to construct quiz/test items manually). If you are interested in administering a full-length exam (e.g., mid-term or final), it takes a number of hours, if not days, to make a simple multiple-choice midterm/final exam. Importing quiz/test items will save a lot of time and effort if you are interested in making a lot of quizzes or exercises on Blackboard.

There are three ways to import quiz/test items into Blackboard.

• You can import raw text files into the Pools or Tests area.
• You can import a XML format file into the Pools area.
• You can export and import a zipped format file into the Pools or Tests area.

In this document, I will discuss only the first option. For developing items in the XML format, please refer to CSI Blackboard Quiz Generator. The third option is discussed at BB: Import or Export Tests, Surveys, and Pools.

The following figure shows the overview of the import and export processes of the quiz/test items on BB.

There are different types of questions that you can use in the quiz/test sections on Blackboard. The following five test items are most frequently used.

• Multiple choices
  
• Multiple answers
  
• True or False question
  
• Essay question
  
• Fill-in-the-blank question
  

In order to develop your quiz/test items off-line, you will need to create a tab-delimited text file, which separates each column by a ”tab” key stroke. Microsoft Excel has a function to export an Excel file into this format, so Excel might be a natural choice to develop quiz/test items in this format. Quiz/test items in the tab-delimited text file will be imported into the Pools section of Blackboard, from which you can select questions to create a quiz/test set. Once quiz/test items are imported into the Pools section, these items can be exported as a ZIP file that can be easily shared with your colleagues teaching the same course. The zipped file uses a combination of XML files and dat (data) files, which are only readable by computers, but it also saves more information about quiz/text items such as item weight, the order of items, randomization preference etc.

The tab-delimited file in Excel looks like below. This example file can be downloaded at this link (Excel file) .

The first column shows the type of questions. Below is the list of questions types:

• MC: Multiple choice question
• MA: Multiple answers question
• FIB_PLUS: Multiple fill-in-the-blank question
• FIB: Fill-in-the-blank question
• TF: True/False question
• ESS: Essay question
• ORD: Ordering question
• NUM: Numeric response quesiton
• OP: Likert-scale answer

The second column is the stem (item text/prompt) of the question. Note that fill-in-the-blank question has a special tag [x] to indicate a blank in the stem. After the third column are pairs of an answer option and its property (i.e., if it is a correct answer or distractor).

Once your items are ready with Excel, you should export them into a tab-delimited text file. Go to "File", choose "Save as", and select "Tab delimited Text (.txt)." An example of the tab-delimited text file can be downloaded at this link.

1. Log into Blackboard. Select your class and click on "Tests, Surveys, and Pools" under "Course Tools."
   
2. Click on "Tests." And then "Build Test."
   
3. Put a title for the test. (e.g., "Chapter 1 Vocabulary Quiz" etc.)
   
4. Click on "Upload Questions" (Note that there is an option to "Upload Test", but it will not work with the tab-delimited text file.)
   
5. Select the tab-delimit file and upload questions. Once items have been imported, you should be able to change their item properties (e.g., how many points each item should have) en masse.