D2L

by Erika Merschrod 5 years, 9 months ago

Hi all!  I am planning to import OpenStax Chemistry into D2L in some form (initially probably just chunking the text and pasting it into various HTML files).  If you have imported any of the book or associated materials into D2L already, please let me know!  I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

Thanks!

Erika

Erin Sullivan 5 years, 9 months ago

Hi Erika,

I have also toyed with doing exactly this, however, I think it is a longer term goal and my first step will be deciding for sure to go with OpenStax. Have you made much progress? How hard are you finding it to do?

Erika Merschrod 5 years, 9 months ago

I haven't gotten very far, because I want to come up with a clean way to automatically upload things first.  That should save time later!  Also, I am trying to decide whether I want to upload the entire book once I have a way to do that, or whether I want to tailor it for my class specifically.  As an online resource I think it would be good to have a D2L shell that has the whole book, so that others can use it as they wish, so I'll probably go that route.

My starting point is the download of all of the xml, html and image files (a large zip file called chemistry-10.5.zip containing a folder called col11760_1.10complete which then contains a bunch of folders).  The book is already chopped into sections, so that helps.

Erika Merschrod 5 years, 2 months ago

I did it!  Had to put this on the back burner, but it turns out not to be so hard.  To import the whole book you just need a properly formatted imsmanifest.xml file.  I converted the collection.xml file into that, rezipped, and it imported into D2L!  The structure of the zip file matters.  The zip file you download from the online book (the "offline" zip version as opposed to the pdf version) has a folder inside that has the xml files and various folders within it.  Don't zip that overall folder, but instead zip its contents (now collection.xml, imsmanifest.xml, and a bunch of folders).  These materials are now under the "Shared Resources" tab.  (They are "pending" right now, so maybe you can't see it.  If you need these files, just contact me directly!  I'm the only Erika in the Chemistry department at Memorial University.

Erika