Moving a Quiz Between Two Systems That Refuse to Talk

This post is about the boring but important problem of data portability, using a quiz as the example.

The Problem Nobody Wants

Imagine you are a lecturer who spent years building quizzes in Moodle. Hundreds of questions, carefully written and scored. Now your university wants to move to a different platform, Chamilo. Your learning content transfers fine, because both support a shared standard called SCORM. But your quizzes? They are stuck.

Moodle exports quizzes in its own format called Moodle XML. Chamilo imports quizzes in a different standard called IMS QTI. The two do not speak the same language. Years of assessment work, trapped in one system.

Why This Happens

When I compared the two formats, the mismatches were everywhere. Moodle XML clearly labels a question as "multichoice." IMS QTI does not define the type the same way. Moodle wraps its question text in HTML and CDATA blocks. IMS QTI uses a simple prompt tag. Moodle even inserts a "question 0" category section that IMS QTI has no place for.

Neither format is wrong. They just evolved separately, solving the same problem in incompatible ways. This is the story of software everywhere.

The Bridge

Instead of writing a direct Moodle-to-Chamilo converter (which would break the moment either format changed), I built an intermediate format I called Bridge.xml. It captures the essential parts of any question: the text, the type, the answers, the correct answer, the score. Neutral. Format-agnostic.

The flow is simple. Export the quiz from Moodle as Moodle XML. Convert it into Bridge.xml. Generate IMS QTI from Bridge.xml. Import into Chamilo. The quiz shows up correctly, questions and scoring intact.

The advantage of a middle format: if a third LMS comes along tomorrow, I only need to teach Bridge.xml how to talk to it. I do not need to rewrite everything.

The Bigger Point

This paper is not glamorous. It is about XML tags and quiz questions. But it touches something that matters: your work should not be a prisoner of the tool you happened to use. Data portability is a form of freedom. When systems refuse to talk to each other, it is usually the user who pays the price. A little bridge in the middle can set the data free.

Read the Full Paper

Read the full paper: Moodle XML to IMS QTI Assessment Test Portability on Learning Management System →

Published at ICTS 2013, Bali, Indonesia. Part of my doctoral research at Kumamoto University.