Common Cartridge

High level description

Common Cartridge export of limited course content can be accessed by the teacher through the backup/maintenance tool in any course. It will export documents, links, forums and tests to the Common Cartridge 1.3 format, which generates a zip file named something.imscc (you can explore it as a zip file by just renaming it to .zip). This .imscc file can then be imported into another compatible Common Cartridge 1.3 system, through their own import process.

Technical level description

Limited support for Common Cartridge 1.3 has been added in Chamilo 1.11.16 (August 2021), based on the libraries already developed in Moodle 3.10.

Due to naming conventions, the classes have been considerably refactored, as Moodle 3 did not respect PSR-1. This might (sadly) make it relatively complex to find the original code in Chamilo's code, but the intent was not to confuse anyone (sorry if it does).

Despite defining 6 question "profile" types, however (as the standard specifies), this implementation only supported 5 types and we only implemented 4 of those so far (unique answer, multiple answer, essay, and partially fill-in-the-blanks/FIB), the rest being left for another opportunity with specific demand for this. Instead, we focused on supporting documents, forums, links and assets/resources, additionally to the exercises which can already be exported to QTI (another IMS-supported standard).

Several issues with .imscc exports of questions in 1.11.26 were fixed in 1.11.28, support for open questions ("essays" in CC1.3) was added, partial support for FIB questions, and media export/import was improved.

Special path token

Common Cartridge 1.3 defines a "special token" to represent a root path for file paths (for web content/assets), that will be used to replace the local path and make it easy to create a new path on the destination system. Only that this token was initially $IMS-CC-FILEBASE$ but then when IMS Global changed name to 1EdTech, they also changed the token to $1EdTech-CC-FILEBASE$. This is not only confusing, it is also potentially breaking the restoration of Common Cartridge embedded files on the destination system, if they are not aware of this change.

In Chamilo (since 1.11.28), we format the links inside the .imscc package with the new token, but during import, we also tolerate the previous token. You can We also submitted an issue to Canvas to update their import code to tolerate both: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/issues/2376