Praising a GOOD small business
I always try to praise small businesses that do things right.

With schools and colleges on idiot pointless lockdown, online stuff is taking precedence, so it's not surprising that my publisher passed along a request for more online stuff yesterday. One of their customers wanted to have our test questions redone in a form usable in the Canvas LMS. These 'testbanks' were put together by the book's author in regular Word DOC form. They're suitable for printing out and using in a classroom, but not for online use.

The e-learning world is fragmented and poorly documented, with each of the major players using its own proprietary formats. There are "standards", but they only serve as points of departure. Each LMS tries to depart from the "standards" as far as possible.

I tried to make the conversion manually and got nowhere. After perusing forums, it's clear that Canvas is the most departurish of all. Many colleges have switched from Moodle to Canvas for unknown reasons, and many profs and IT folks are regretting the switch.

Here's where the nice small business comes in. Respondus makes a converter program to serve this exact purpose. It takes in questions and texts in Word Doc or raw TXT and converts them automatically to the right format for every common LMS.

I bought the program ($79 single-user) and tried it. The output is a little too automatic, assuming you have a connection to a Canvas install. We don't have a connection; we want to place the testbanks in various formats on the publisher's website so universities can install them. Respondus was advertised as having an option to output a file, but the method was not obvious from the program itself or the help PDFs. I emailed the company at 3:15PM on Friday, and they responded TEN MINUTES LATER with a live non-India reply that explained the procedure. I tried it that way, and the result works in Canvas.

GOOD JOB, RESPONDUS!

[Personal sidenote: I'm very glad this little work assignment came along. Doing real work for a real purpose is the best defense against all-consuming monsters. That's why the all-consuming monsters are depriving Deplorables of real work. Self-defense is the worst of all sins in Soros World.]

Labels: infinite GOOD, Make or break

  ¶ 11:19 PM