Importing/Exporting .imscc format: How To

July 8, 2020 3:42 AM

The .imscc format is used by Blackboard, Schoology, and Canvas to import and export courses. Tragically, a course created in Canvas does not work in Blackboard or Schoology, and a course created in Blackboard does not work in Canvas... you get the idea. The information just doesn't seem to port over correctly. Does anyone have any experience, or better still, success with getting courses to work across these different platforms? How do you do it? I'd be happy to pay for someone to help me figure out the technical side, but I'm not even sure what I should be asking for.
posted by Alex Haist to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: Define "work."

The .imscc format is the IMS Common Cartridge specification. The IMS Global Learning Consortium develops interoperability standards for educational technology, like learning management systems (LMS's) such as Blackboard, D2L, Canvas, Moodle, Schoology, etc.

You can think of IMS Common Cartridge as the .txt file format of online courses. It will bring across the really basic stuff as you move data between two proprietary applications, but you're going to lose most of the bells & whistles.

In the case of Common Cartridge, that means it supports mostly just static content, question banks, external links, and LTI tools. (LTI = Learning Tools Interoperability specification, another IMS spec that allows integration between the learning management system and other types of applications).

Note that most LMS's have more question types than are supported by Common Cartridge, so only some of your questions in a question bank might come across. And you're going to entirely lose data and features like assignments, exams, discussion boards, and other tools within the course because most of those are implemented among the various LMS's in proprietary ways that cannot be easilty translated to a common data export format.

The reality is that Common Cartridge was never intended to be a transport format to move courses from one LMS to another LMS. It was designed to meet the needs of textbook publishers who wanted to be able to provide supplemental content for their textbooks in LMS platforms in a "write once, use anywhere" way. Instead of building a Blackboard version and a Canvas version and a Moodle version and a Schoology version and an etc etc version of their content, the publishers build a single Common Cartridge version that can be used with any LMS to supplement their textbook.

So the TL;DR is you're never going to be able to use .imscc to duplicate a course from one LMS in another LMS. At best you're going to be able to pull over some of the basic content from your old LMS course so you don't have to recreate it all from scratch in the new LMS course. But many times the course designer will have relied so heavily on the individual LMS's proprietary content-building tools, that export to Common Cartridge (.imscc) creates more work than it saves.

Sorry. I know that's probably not the answer you wanted.

Source: I worked at Blackboard for 15+ years.
posted by gritter at 5:11 AM on July 8, 2020 [19 favorites]

Is this for your own courses, or a large set of courses for an institution? If the former, I'd focus on making the components portable, as in creating them outside the LMS so they can be otherwise packed up and moved rather than as described above. If you make something SCORM compliant, like in Storyline, it'll work in any of these, and so will a Word doc, etc., as I'm sure you know already....so I think it's a matter of keeping stuff organized and then re-creating the course won't be onerous. Hopefully.

Also not the answer you wanted, sorry :(

If it is a large set of courses, paying someone by the hour to recreate stuff in the next LMS will employ a sad out-of-work learning coordinator, which is nice right now...
posted by wellred at 6:04 AM on July 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: @wellred: It is for a large institution, and I'm the one getting paid by the hour. I just... resent inefficiency.

@gritter: Thank you for the very thorough answer. It's good to know that each course will basically have to be recreated in each LMS like wellred said.
posted by Alex Haist at 8:52 AM on July 8, 2020 [3 favorites]

Different LMSes have different import tools and will read various different file formats. We are in the middle of transitioning from Blackboard to Canvas and were able to work with both vendors to export 2 years worth of Blackboard courses into Canvas using the Blackboard export zip format, and Canvas lets any user import a variety of file formats into their course, including Blackboard zips or imscc. But, like gritter said, define "work". These platforms all have very different organizing principles, so depending on how the original course was structured and functioned, it may come into the new platform looking hunky-dory and need a minimum of poking to get it into shape, or it may be an ungodly mess and it's quite individual depending on a bunch of different factors.
posted by soren_lorensen at 9:44 AM on July 8, 2020