Original: http://www.wc.cc.va.us/services/blackboard
Most reliable site: http://www.csi.edu/blackboard/bbquiz/Default.aspx
A third site, at Algonquin College, uses a different file format for the input: http://lts4.algonquincollege.com/TestGen/TestGen.aspx
With all of these sites the process is similar: you create a TEXT file holding your questions and answers, and submit that text through the Web site's window. The result is a ".zip" file which you download to your computer. Then you use the "Import Pool" function in Blackboard to get that file of questions-and-answers uploaded. (Note to Macintosh users: Please use Firefox rather than Safari with the Quiz Generator site!)
The Blackboard Quiz Generator is a wonderful, timesaving tool to help you create question pools in Blackboard. You can work with multiple choice, multiple answer, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, matching and essay questions. It operates with PLAIN TEXT files only, and that creates some complications when your ordinary typing environment is Microsoft Word. The directions below will help you work with any Microsoft Word file to make sure that the text you supply to the Quiz Generator is suitable.
The Quiz Generator cannot process any so-called smart characters-"curly" quotation marks and apostrophes, long dashes, graphical symbols for fractions and ordinals, etc. (Note for readers familiar with HTML codes: see the Advanced Topic at the bottom of this page.) Microsoft Word, on the other hand, freely inserts those characters as you type, and as a result the text from a Microsoft Word document often causes trouble with the Quiz Generator. Even if you save your Word file as "Rich Text Format," any smart characters will be carried along. One solution is to change the settings in Word so that no smart characters are used, but that's very inconvenient. The better solution is to make some very precise format selections when saving the file. If you don't follow these directions accurately, the file you obtain from the Quiz Generator is likely to be unusable inside Blackboard. If you get an error in Blackboard when you open a pool built through the Quiz Generator, the most likely cause is that you did not take care of all smart characters by following the CRUCIAL directions below.
Here are the steps that will insure that the text you copy into the Quiz Generator contains only the right kind of characters:
When you are ready to save your file, open the File menu and select "Save As."
On the "Save As" dialog box, look for the menu labeled "Save as type:" or "Format," and click to open the drop-down menu. In Word 2003, look for the entry that says "Plain Text," noting that you may need to scroll the menu to find it. In other versions of Word, or in other programs, you might see several choices that say "Text" with qualifiers such as "MS-DOS" or "ANSI" or "ASCII." If your choices include MS-DOS, that's the right one; otherwise, prefer ANSI to ASCII. If there are several MS-DOS choices, select the one that DOES NOT include "line breaks." You may name your file anything you like, noting that ".txt" is the correct file extension. Click to Save the file .
When you click to Save the file, you are likely to get some warnings that formatting will be lost , etc. That's exactly what you want to see, and your action at this point is CRUCIAL to your success with the Quiz Generator site. In Word 2003, you will see a box labeled "File Conversion," and you should click the radio button for MS-DOS and the checkbox to "Allow character substitution." Those choices are the real keys to be sure that all smart characters get replaced with their plan-text equivalents. Click OK to finish saving the file.
Another CRUCIAL step is to OPEN THE SAVED FILE in WordPad or Notepad or Text Edit (Macintosh). Do not try to copy the text from the display of your Word document, because the Word window will still contain smart characters, even though you think you are looking at the properly saved, pure plain text version. Copy the text from the WordPad or Notepad or Text Edit display, and paste that into the box at the Quiz Generator site.
ADVANCED TOPIC: Working with HTML tags to get special formatting
The College of Southern Idaho site generates errors if your text contains HTML tags, so you cannot type them in normal fashion into your text to get italics or boldface or lists, etc., in the Bb pool. The brute force way is to pump only the text through the CSI site, and then format the text through the Pool Manager editor. A slightly more elegant way is to type the relevant HTML codes into the text file but use < for the left angle bracket and > for the right bracket. When your text is processed through the CSI site and then imported into Bb, the Pool Manager will display those strings as normal angle brackets. To make them "work," click to Modify the question, and then highlight-and-copy the visible text (containing the strings that look like HTML tags). Open the HTML source window for that item, and replace the contents (containing the &-tokens) with what you copied. Now Bb will correctly interpret the tags, and your question will appear as you intended!