How do colleges, universities and companies migrate from learning management systems like Blackboard Vista or WebCT to Moodle? For many organizations looking to do away with licensing costs and other issues associated with commercial LMS products, this can be a technically challenging and potentially expensive process. The trick is to automate the process as much as possible.
That is how Lambda Solutions, through a strategic partnership, is able to offer a high quality course conversion to the Moodle LMS that potentially can be delivered in hours instead of weeks or months. This is a huge improvement for migration speed compared with what was possible even a year ago.
“The challenge is converting course information from one system to another,” says Moodle migration expert Glen Sabatier.
The system is flexible, offering “near-teachable results when the data moves over,” Sabatier says. Highlights of this process include:
- Rapid and Accurate migration of course contents between LMS products (Including WebCT to all versions of Moodle)
- Enterprise level backup and restore solutions for LMS content
- Automation and integration of your LMS with other institutional systems like the ERP System
- Custom solution development to expand the functionality of your LMS
Homepage level folders and Learning Modules are transferred to individual topics. This allows your organization to migrate files, folders, quizzes, assignments (including files connected to an assignment), pages, weblinks and discussions. HTML pages are converted to Moodle Pages which are then fully editable inside Moodle.
This process also allows organizations migrating to Moodle to include data from sources other than the previous LMS. “This feature can be used to include content such as Moodle orientation modules into the new courses. A lot of universities are using the Moodle migration project as an opportunity to create minimum online presence (syllabus, book lists, calender) for all their courses,” Sabatier adds.
“Because we do this in an automated way, results are consistent across the board,” says Lambda Solutions Jim Yupangco. “If you tried to do this manually, you would be more likely to produce errors. Doing that over hundreds or thousands of courses, you can see it generates huge savings in time and resources. Once a suitable template is built with the client, you could convert hundreds or thousands of courses in a single day.”
