Grades: What to do When Bb Goes Away?

[smithma]

So I have looked at different areas in the Community (the Migration Strategies area, for example) and I can't seem to find an answer. You guys in the Community are so awesome, that I know someone will chime in and give me some ideas on where to go in my research below.

So as my institution embarks on a migration from Bb to Canvas (estimate to be fully migrated will be by May 2018), we have a concern: grade disputes. Even if we keep a Bb environment for a year after we're fully on Canvas, the state requires us to assist in grade disputes upwards of 5 years back. We do have Bb archives of all past courses and those contain all content, grades, and student submissions, but the only way (that we know of) to look at the information collectively is by restoring/resurrecting a course in a Bb instance. As an admin, I even tried to import a course archive to Bb CourseSites, but nothing: it (understandably) brought over only the content; no users or grades. I reached out to CourseSites Support and they confirmed that all you can do is import in CourseSites and that the import will not bring over grades.

We're going to have faculty and IDs export their gradebooks prior to migrating, but that's not enough. Faculty would have to look at the whole picture to be able to access how a grade was given.

So in short, how have other institutions dealt with grade dispute issues (if any) once you no longer can pull up grades and activity from your former LMS?

Any guidance in the right direction here would be great.

Thanks!

[kona]

 @smithma ‌, we moved from Angel so I unfortunately can't be much help with the Bb side of this. 

To get your question more exposure (and hopefully some suggestions) I'm going to share it with the https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/lms-migration?sr=search&searchId=7687291c-4526-4872-ab43-a477...‌ & https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/admins?sr=search&searchId=78cf180a-a245-4017-be3e-887355a341b...‌ groups in the Community to see if they can help. 

[kenneth_rogers]

Hello,  @smithma !

Hopefully someone with way more knowledge on this topic from one of those two groups  @kona ‌ mentioned will chime in, but I did a search and it doesn't appear to be very possible. Here's what I have found:

• In the discussion Is there a way to copy grades from Blackboard to Canvas ,  @bgibson ‌ talks about the challenges that can be faced with this. He does, however, bring some hope when he says "We've chosen to copy the Blackboard database and pull grades via SQL commands." This won't help with the assignment evidence, but will at least provide grades.
• As part of the University of Missouri's migration, they have a FAQ site setup where I found this page: What happens to Blackboard information after December 2017?: Blackboard to Canvas Migration. On that page they spell out that their imports into Canvas only bring in content - not student data (which I think we all know). But they also provide some hope when they tell instructors to contact them if they need access to student data. Maybe it's worth giving them a holler for more info?
• And lastly - how is FIU's relationship with FSU? They have some basic info up in regards to their migration (Bb-to-Canvas Transition - FSU Bb Support Center ). Part of that is encouraging faculty in the steps to take to preserve data. It may be worth reaching out to them as well to see how they are handling the 5 year requirement.

I hope this helps and doesn't muddy the water at all! If you have any follow up questions be sure to let us know!

[straussi]

We also moved from Blackboard to Canvas, but unfortunately you have tried all the tricks we tried as well. There's nothing we could find with our archives that will restore the courses other than a Blackboard instance; CourseSites isn't going to help because it can't match up the users to any 'known' accounts. We also reached out to Blackboard for the possibility of a 'test' instance maintained for 1-5 years with our full instance, but minimal access. They quoted some phenomenal amount of money, perhaps understandably.  

[emlarson]

For those who aren't confident that "faculty and IDs export their gradebooks prior to migrating" there's something of an awkward workaround.  Assuming you have a Blackboard .ZIP archive of the course (and some courage and patience), open it up on a computer.  Open the imsmanifest.xml file in Notepad or a similar text editor and search for "gradebook".  You'll find a line like this:

<resource bb:file="res00155.dat"
   bb:title="Gradebook" identifier="res00155" type="course/x-bb-gradebook" xml:base="res00155"/>

Then, open that file (in this case, "res00155.dat").  It'll be a different filename for every archive, so you need to hunt for the correct one in the imsmanifest.xml file.

That .dat file is a bunch of messy XML that contains the course gradebook.

In our Blackboard version, at least, you find the student name and then what appears to be a unique ID for each ID, which allows anonymous grading.  So with some work you can "connect the dots" and figure out what the Grade Center representation was.

I haven't played with it much yet but it's what we're going to rely on if someone comes out of the woodwork years from now and needs us to reconstruct the Grade Center without any Blackboard instance to restore the course onto.