Canvas and ExamView

[Graham Pearson]

Can anyone point me into a direction regarding importing examview text
bank questions into canvas. Has anyone perform this? If this does not
exist, what information, files, etc are needed to create a module for
canvas.

[Rico Mundy]

We have just been experimenting with ExamView extensively at our institution the last couple days to get questions from it into Canvas. The latest version of ExamView we had access to is 6.2.1 for the PC.

So the process in ExamView is to open the desired TestBank
Choose Export --> WebCT CE 4-6/Vista 3-4...
This saves a ZIP file (apparently in QTI format)
In Canvas course go to Settings-->Import Content into this Course
Choose "Import Quizzes" and choose the ZIP file saved above.
This process will create a "Quiz" which can be deleted and a Question Bank which you can use. The questions came in correctly and the correct answer was properly indicated (at least on the MC questions we checked)

Some problems:
An instructor with a Mac and version 6.2.2 of ExamView did NOT have the WebCT version of the export option. It only showed a couple Blackboard versions and an RTF option. She tried the Blackboard options and had some major problems. When importing she chose the "Import content from a content package or from another system" option in Canvas. The first import went fine and all the questions came in. The second import only brought one question in and the rest of the imports failed from that point on. It seems there is a problem with the Blackboard export/import. For now we are going to have everyone use the WebCT version from the various test bank programs. We have verified the WebCT also works in Pearson Testgen application (v7.4.5)

[Gregory Combs]

I'm a Mac user/developer and I've also used ExamView for several years ... what's funny (as in "weird", not "haha") is that if there's one thing that never changes it's ExamView on a Mac ... while there are thousands of advances across the field, there's one thing you can surely depend on ... a completely horrible experience if you want to run a test generator / test bank database ... Problem A) ExamView folks don't keep up with development when more modern operating system versions appear (much like Intuit on the mac).  Problem B) ExamView was pretty much the only game in town for an actual mac desktop solution for this.  Problem C) Once the ExamView folks finally got around to creating an update (7.5) for the mac after a decade or so, it's pretty much worthless and unreliable.  Moreover, with Mac OS X Lion, all other previous ExamView versions will absolutely not run ... because there's no longer a virtual PPC framework to run code written for the old processors.

Getting back to ricomundy's remarks ... It's true, on the Mac ExamView (even when 6.2 actually ran) you couldn't export XML, but you could import it ... I hate it when they do that.  So my current "solution" is to run ExamView in a VMWare virtual machine on an older operating system, then export each of the blackboard versions of the test ... then dig through the output to figure out which one of these versions is remotely similar to WebCT, or whichever one is a simpler XML format, then I manually run grep search/replace on the XML to turn it into something that Canvas or Respondus, or something else can actually use.

If anyone else is a Mac developer who is interested in collaborating on a desktop app that would put ExamView to rest forever, contact me.  I doubt we'd ever make any money but I'm sure we could put some shame on those jerks.  (Oh, and naturally, we'd figure out a way to cleanly import/export from Canvas!)

[grakker]

I know I'm replying to an older thread, but I'm wondering what the progress is on ExamView imports.  Our district adopted a Pearson book for our Algebra I class.  It comes with ExamView.  I exported the question bank, and then imported into Canvas.  No real problems there.  But when I go to open the question bank, almost every question seems to have an image.  I know from reading here that Canvas can't import images from QTI.  Or that QTI doesn't support images.  Same thing from a user standpoint.  All the images are stored in the same directory.  Any way to run a sed command on wherever the question bank is stored and make this work?

[bracken]

QTI supports images and Canvas should import images for any QTI imports. Each vendor tends to implement including images in a different way however, so making it work for everyone is a bit problematic. Could you email me an example package that is having this problem so that we take a look at what the problem is? (probably best not to attach that to the public user group)

[grakker]

OK, I hacked up a quick script that seems to work. After exporting
from my version of Examview, I just run the following script (saved as
QTIfix.sh) on it:


#!/bin/sh
die () {
echo >&2 "$@"
exit 1
}
[ "$#" -eq 1 ] || die "USAGE: QTIfix.sh ZIPFILE"

UNIQUE=`basename $1 .zip`
unzip $UNIQUE.zip
sed "s|files/org0|files/$UNIQUE|" imsmanifest.xml > temp.xml
mv temp.xml imsmanifest.xml
mv QIZ_0_M/my_files/org0 QIZ_0_M/my_files/$UNIQUE
FROM='src="org0'
TO='src="QIZ_0_M/my_files/'"$UNIQUE"
sed "s|$FROM|$TO|g" QIZ_0_M/data/questionDB.xml > temp.xml
mv temp.xml QIZ_0_M/data/questionDB.xml
zip -r "$UNIQUE"_fixed.zip imsmanifest.xml QIZ_0_M
rm -rf imsmanifest.xml QIZ_0_M

Basically, it just goes through and fixes the paths, and adds a unique
directory based on the zip file name. A colleague of mine has a Mac
and teaches a different subject. For his zip file to work I had to s/
QIZ_0_M/QIZ0M/g the script. And that worked for him. I'm just
posting this here for anyone who is trying this. I was able to import
question banks from 11 chapters in about 5 minutes doing this. This
is all Linux, so I don't know about others.

[Charles Wood]

You're using pretty basic tools, so this should work (assuming you have the right packages installed) on any Linux or Unix based system. 

On some Linux distro's I've used, you may need to install the zip and/or unzip packages. (You'll probably need them for other things anyhow.)

That's super handy. Thanks for sharing.

Charles Max Wood

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