OpenStax Introduction to Business

So, I'm going to be teaching an Introduction to Business course and a Business Ethics course for the 1st time starting in a couple of weeks. I made the conscious decision to use OER resources because I believe in the OER movement. Here is my opportunity to give back. Over the years, I've been at a Blackboard school, a Blackboard employee, as well as using Blackboard products as a student and instructor. So, I have the experience to get this job done. At no time have I ever been more disappointed in Blackboard as I have been trying to incorporate the OpenStax resources into an Ultra course. This is not meant to be a Blackboard-trashing thread, but I want to provide you the steps I used to get the Question Banks into Ultra - because simply restoring the course does not provide them.

I'm happy to share the files I used, but I only used the MC/TF banks, so those are the only files I used.

Here's what I did:

1. Signed up for a free Canvas account on Instructure's site. I used this course to restore the Canvas course provided on the OpenStax site.
2. Using the Canvas course, I created quizzes using all the question banks individually.
3. From there, I exported each quiz from Canvas - this creates a ZIP file that is QTI-compliant. However, Ultra will not accept QTI resources.
4. Downloaded a copy of Respondus. (Sidebar: I am an Apple user, so to further complicate things, I used Crossover to run Respondus - a Windows-only app - on my Mac). Using Respondus I imported each individual quiz into its own Respondus file.
5. Published each Respondus file to a Word document. This creates a format you can use to convert text to a quiz.
6. Using a Blackboard Test Generator site (I used Oklahoma Christian University's site: https://ed.oc.edu/blackboardquizgenerator/) you can copy and paste from Word into this website. Its output is yet another ZIP file. Note: there were a few errors in the test banks which can be easily edited here before conversion.
7. Going into my Ultra course, I can then use it's "Manage Question Banks" feature to successfully import each individual question pool.
8. Now, I was able to create quizzes using each of the pools.

Considerations:

• I do not have access to an Original Course view. I tried Coursesites and it would not work that way. Maybe if you have access to a Learn instance it might be easier - for me it was not.
• I tried a few QTI tools to no avail. Maybe there are other alternatives out there, but I wanted to stay inside of Ultra and not use things like TurningPoint.
• The RTF files contain more information than Ultra and Respondus will accept (goals, title, etc.) and they have additional wording in there to identify question types by groups - so they are not easily edited. And we are talking about 17 chapters of more than 100 questions each. I don't have time to manually edit those files. Maybe someone smarter then me could create a script to clean that up.