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Specify case sensitivity for Blackboard tests when designing outside of Blackboard?


All!

I am trying design tests in Blackboard that have many questions. I've been using MS Excel to make long collections of questions that I upload to Blackboard. This has been working very well and I've been able to use HTML to my advantage to specify formatting of the question text itself.

I'm hitting one small snag. I would really like to specify that some of the answers are case sensitive but I don't want to have to go in Blackboard and check the box for each question when I have hundreds of questions. Is there a way to use some HTML to specify case sensitivity of an answer when I'm designing the questions in Excel that will transfer into Blackboard? This would really save me a lot of time. Thanks for your suggestions!


Solution (indirect): Design the test questions in excel and then populate a pool with them in Blackboard. Export the pool. Unzip the pool. Open the largest DAT file (probably res00001.dat or res00002.dat) with notepad or some text editor that's not going to change anything on its own. Search for: case="No". This is the value that determines the case sensitivity. The values are "No" and "Yes". Use find & replace all to change the answers to "Yes" but if you're only changing some answers to Yes then include some of the answer that needs adjusting in your find & replace, like this:

Find: case="No">answerValueYoureAdjusting

Replace with: case="Yes">answerValueYoureAdjusting

Save the file. Make a new zip file consisting of everything from the old one and your adjusted file. Upload the pool to Blackboard.

It's not the easiest solution but if you have lots of questions it's faster than doing it manually in Blackboard.


Solution

  • Solution (indirect): Design the test questions in excel and then populate a pool with them in Blackboard. Export the pool. Unzip the pool. Open the largest DAT file (probably res00001.dat or res00002.dat) with notepad or some text editor that's not going to change anything on its own. Search for: case="No". This is the value that determines the case sensitivity. The values are "No" and "Yes". Use find & replace all to change the answers to "Yes" but if you're only changing some answers to Yes then include some of the answer that needs adjusting in your find & replace, like this:

    Find: case="No">answerValueYoureAdjusting

    Replace with: case="Yes">answerValueYoureAdjusting

    Save the file. Make a new zip file consisting of everything from the old one and your adjusted file. Upload the pool to Blackboard.

    It's not the easiest solution but if you have lots of questions it's faster than doing it manually in Blackboard.