A tool to analyse Numbas attempt data from a Blackboard course
Good news, everyone! We’ve found a way to get useful information about attempts on Numbas tests out of Blackboard, and present it like this:
The current situation at Newcastle is that all of our in-course Numbas tests which count towards credit are run through a Moodle server set up specifically for the purpose, even though our institutional VLE is Blackboard.
The reason for that boils down to the fact that Blackboard doesn’t make it easy to analyse data to do with SCORM packages: the built-in SCORM reports don’t give much useful information and are tedious to generate, and it’s unclear where in the database the SCORM data lies. If a student claims that their answer was marked incorrectly, we have no way of checking it because Blackboard only gives you the student’s reponse to an interaction, and not the expected response. And sometimes that’s not enough: it’s much easier to work out where a student’s gone wrong if you can load up the test as they saw it. SCORM has a review mode which does that, and while I was able to add support for that to the open-source Moodle server, Blackboard is a black box and brooks no intervention.