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I'm trying to import the Blackboard.zip file created by r/exams but I got the following warning

Dec 10, 2020 2:00:36 PM - [FATAL] Fatal: An error has occurred. The error recorded is:
  The .zip file you provided failed to import. Please try again with a new file.
  For more information, see the detailed log.
Dec 10, 2020 2:00:36 PM - [WARNING] Status: The operation import did not complete.

I thought that it was problem of my R installation, and tried to import the file given in http://www.r-exams.org/assets/posts/2018-04-16-exams2blackboard//blackboard.zip

and even so I get the same error message.

Does anyone knows what is happening? I even try to import a QTI 2.1 file generated by exams package and same error.

I really appreciate any help.

mujy4w4p
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  • Hmmm, strange. Niels (the main author behind `exams2blackboard`) did a couple of improvements in the development version. I'm not sure whether any of the fixes are related to your problem but maybe you can try again after: `install.packages("exams", repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org")`. Re: QTI 2.1. We haven't checked what kind of tweaks in the QTI 2.1 are necessary for Bb, yet, that's still on the to-do list for 2021... – Achim Zeileis Dec 10 '20 at 21:51

1 Answers1

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I asked my co-author Niels Smits - the main author behind exams2blackboard - to check what is going on. He confirms that the old blackboard.zip file shared with our blog post from April 2018 does not work in current versions of Blackboard anymore. Potentially this is caused by a duplication of some files in the .zip that we had overlooked in earlier versions of R/exams

However, R/exams version 2.4-0 has fixed several problems with exams2blackboard which apparently also solves the problems you are describing. Thus, please update R/exams to a version of at least 2.4-0 and you should be able to avoid the reported issues. After that the output from exams2blackboard should work as an input for current Blackboard versions.

Regarding the QTI 2.1 support. The exams2qti21 function tries to follow the guidance in the official IMS QTI 2.1 description and has mostly been tested with OpenOLAT. The QTI 2.1 XML files produced by exams2qti21 do not cooperate with Blackboard, yet, presumably because Blackboard has introduced their own QTI 2.1 "flavor". (Note that Blackboard's QTI 1.2 flavor also deviated quite substantially from a plain QTI 1.2 implementation.) We still have to look into this to check whether we can support Blackboard's QTI 2.1 flavor as well.

Achim Zeileis
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