Import Guide

This page explains how question text becomes something Blackboard will actually accept, and why. It is deliberately didactic: every term is defined before it is used, because the failure modes here are almost always a mismatch between what you think the importer reads and what it actually reads.

1. Two ways into Blackboard

Blackboard does not have a single "import questions" button. It has two unrelated pipelines, and a file built for one will be rejected by the other. Knowing which one you are using is the whole game.

• Upload Questions takes a plain text file (tab-delimited). It is fast and is meant for dropping questions straight into one test or pool you are already editing.
• Import Pool / Import Question Bank takes a ZIP package. The ZIP is a small archive that describes itself with a manifest. This is the path most external generators (including this one) target, because it creates a reusable pool you can draw from across multiple tests.

This tool produces both. The Download .txt button is for the first pipeline. The Download Pool (.zip) button is for the second.

2. Path A: the tab-delimited .txt

The simplest format. Each line is one question: a type code, then the question text, then the answers, all separated by TAB characters (not spaces). Example of a single multiple-choice line (arrows mark tabs):

MC →  What does SOC stand for? →  Security Operations Center →  correct →  System Operations Console →  incorrect

How to use it: open a Test or Pool, go to the question canvas, choose Upload Questions, and select the .txt. Blackboard will ask you to assign point values. This path never involves a ZIP. If you feed the ZIP here, or the TXT to the pool importer, you get an error, because each pipeline only understands its own format.

3. Path B: the pool .zip package

A Blackboard package is a ZIP whose contents follow the IMS Content Packaging convention. "IMS Content Packaging" simply means: there is a manifest file at the root named imsmanifest.xml that acts as a table of contents, and the manifest points at the real payload files. Blackboard layers its own conventions on top of that base standard.

How to use it:

• Original course view: Control Panel > Course Tools > Tests, Surveys, and Pools > Pools > Import Pool > Browse, then submit the .zip.
• Ultra course view: open a Question Bank (or the Question Banks area) and choose Import, then select the .zip.

4. Anatomy of the package

The ZIP this tool builds contains exactly three files at the root. No folders.

5. The manifest, and the one attribute that matters

The manifest is short, but one detail decides whether the import succeeds or silently finds nothing. Here is the working version:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<manifest identifier="man00001" xmlns:bb="http://www.blackboard.com/content-packaging/">
  <organization default="toc00001"><tableofcontents identifier="toc00001"/></organization>
  <resources>
    <resource bb:file="res00001.dat" bb:title="My Pool"
              identifier="res00001" type="assessment/x-bb-qti-pool"
              xml:base="res00001"/>
  </resources>
</manifest>

The type tells Blackboard how to read the payload. There are two pool types in the wild:

• assessment/x-bb-pool: an older, proprietary serialization. The importer reads its payload from the plain file= attribute.
• assessment/x-bb-qti-pool: the QTI dialect this tool emits. The importer reads its payload from the namespaced bb:file= attribute, NOT plain file=.

For contrast, the earlier error you may have seen first, "Unable to convert the given package," means something cruder: there was no recognizable manifest at all (for example, a ZIP that just wrapped a .txt). Convert-stage failure means the package was never understood; "no pool found" means it was understood but the pointer was wrong.

6. Inside res00001.dat (the questions)

The payload is a questestinterop document. Its shape is a nesting doll: a pool wraps a section, and the section holds one item per question.

<questestinterop>
  <assessment title="My Pool">
    <assessmentmetadata> ... pool-level bb metadata ... </assessmentmetadata>
    <section>
      <sectionmetadata> ... </sectionmetadata>
      <item title="Question 1" maxattempts="0">
        <itemmetadata> ... bbmd_questiontype=Multiple Choice ... </itemmetadata>
        <presentation> ... the stem and the answer choices ... </presentation>
        <resprocessing> ... which choice is correct, and the score ... </resprocessing>
        <itemfeedback> ... </itemfeedback>
      </item>
      ... more items ...
    </section>
  </assessment>
</questestinterop>

Three parts of each item do the real work:

• itemmetadata declares the question type via bbmd_questiontype (for example Multiple Choice, Multiple Answer, True/False, Essay). This is how Blackboard decides which editor to render.
• presentation holds the stem and the choices. Each choice gets a unique id. The correct answer is referenced later by that id, not by position, so reordering choices cannot break grading.
• resprocessing is the grading logic. A respcondition titled "correct" names the winning choice id and sets the score; multiple-answer questions use an and of the required ids with not around the ones that must be left unselected, plus per-choice partial-credit weights.

7. How points are assigned

Grading hinges on one declaration. The score variable is set up once per item:

<outcomes>
  <decvar varname="SCORE" vartype="Decimal" defaultval="0" minvalue="0" maxvalue="10.000000"/>
</outcomes>

The correct-answer rule then does setvar ... >SCORE.max. That SCORE.max resolves to the maxvalue above. If maxvalue is missing, SCORE.max is undefined and every question silently grades as zero even though the import "worked." So a clean import with all-zero points is almost always a missing maxvalue, not a wrong answer key.

8. Input pool syntax reference

This is the text you paste into the generator. Separate questions with a blank line. A leading 1. or 20) on the question line is optional and is stripped automatically.

Multiple choice (one correct)

1. What does the SOC acronym stand for?
a. System Operations Console
*b. Security Operations Center
c. Service Oriented Cluster

Prefix the correct option with *. Option letters like a. or b) are optional and are stripped.

Multiple answer (more than one correct)

2. Which of the following are symmetric ciphers?
*a. AES
b. RSA
*c. ChaCha20
d. ECDSA

Mark every correct option with *. Two or more correct options is automatically detected as multiple-answer, with balanced partial credit (each correct choice adds, each wrong choice subtracts).

True / False

3. TCP is a connectionless protocol.
*False
True

Provide both True and False lines; star the correct one.

Essay and Fill-in-the-Blank

4. Explain defense in depth in your own words.
Type: E

5. The CIA triad is confidentiality, integrity, and ____.
Type: F

Add a Type: E (essay) or Type: F (fill-in-the-blank) line directly under the question. Because the input format carries no answer key for these, they import as manually graded essay items. Grade them in the Blackboard grade center, or add answers later in Blackboard.

9. Question type mapping

10. Troubleshooting by error message

11. Sources and credits

The package format here is not officially documented by Blackboard, so it was reconstructed from working open-source generators and from the open-source importer that reads the same format:

• The original Oklahoma Christian / Algonquin generator established the imsmanifest.xml + res*.dat shape and the assessment/x-bb-pool type.
• The toastedcrumpets BlackboardQuizMaker and the bristol-d bbquiz fork supplied the questestinterop item layout, the .bb-package-info file, and the QTI pool type.
• The Moodle qformat_blackboard_six importer, being open source, was the ground truth for the decisive detail: QTI pools are read from bb:file, proprietary pools from plain file.