Navigating the Switch From Moodle to D2L Brightspace: Part Two

Mark Schneider is a professor in mathematics and currently serves as the director of LMS transition at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), a polytechnic located in western Canada. In 2023, NAIT selected D2L Brightspace to replace Moodle as their new learning management system (LMS). In the second of a four-part series on transitioning from Moodle to Brightspace, Mark delves into the migration process, sharing what moving content from one learning management system to another was like. You can catch up on Part One here.

Course Migration is a Big Fear When Switching LMSs

It was my biggest source of apprehension. When I got access to D2L Brightspace, the first thing I did was migrate 50 courses myself using the exporter tool. Then I did a screen A to screen B comparison, looking at the content in our previous LMS and then at how it was exported. I wanted to know how successful the migration could be.  

It was phenomenally good. I remember thinking, “This is much better than I expected, and this was using only out-of-the-box functionality.” When I saw the functionality of Brightspace, it was obvious we were behind when it came to our former LMS. That experience helped ease my initial apprehension and helped us set the course for what came next.

Our Instructors Have Varying Workload Constraints

Trying to accommodate our migration process for everyone was something we didn’t think was going to be possible in the time that we had.

We took a ‘rip the Band-Aid off’ approach. We told faculty that we would move all the courses automatically and create a simple process for them to return and migrate any content that didn’t make it through the automated session.

It wouldn’t place anyone at a disadvantage because they could change things down the road. But we needed to get the content into the system quickly. We wanted to avoid a manual process where courses were moved gradually.

Creating Our Crosswalk Document

For our migration process, we took guidance from the information we found online from Carlton University and created a crosswalk document.

The crosswalk document is essentially a comparison between column A and column B. In column A, we outlined the current LMS (Moodle) functionality. In column B, we shared how instructors could replicate it in the new LMS (Brightspace).

Faculty were happy to see that most of the functionality they had grown used to in Moodle could be replicated in Brightspace. They were also happy that a lot of the content they had created in Moodle looked like it would migrate easily to Brightspace.

About a week after sharing that document, we started an auto migration of what our institute calls master course sites. These are our default or template course sites used in each course across our institution. We developed a process from our current LMS to essentially serve the SFTP processing Brightspace to process a queue automatically. We estimate between 4,000 and 5,000 master course sites will be migrated.

We Used the Bulk Course Exporter for the Pilot Courses

I previously shared info about our pilot program before going into a full-scale launch. The feedback we got from the migration of the pilot courses was overwhelmingly positive and helped plan the full migration.

Faculty did share that their courses needed additional adjustments post-bulk migration. Some of the fixes took a few minutes, while some took hours. However, although there were some cases where the changes took several hours, instructors were quite impressed with how the migration went and how receptive Brightspace was to having Moodle content imported into it.

Our Migration Is Happening in Two Stages

Stage one focuses on getting the data and content into the system. Stage two is where we’ll refine the content to deliver exactly how faculty and learning designers want it to be to ensure student success.

Currently, we’re still in stage one. Our IT team developed a process from our current LMS to download backups of Moodle courses and serve them into the SFTP folder, and at the same time, they trigger a CSV file to ensure that there’s tracking of these sites they come across.

Stage two will be a different model depending on the different parts of our business. A few courses will be flawlessly brought into Brightspace in stage one. However, others will require bits and pieces of learning design to ensure a more effective delivery. Additionally, we may see that some subject matter expert content has not been carried into Brightspace very effectively, possibly needing recreation or re-authoring.

How We’re Maintaining Historical Data

There are certain standards by which we must retain our LMS data and content for the sake of being able to retrieve archival information. We’re looking at some third-party options to replicate our current LMS environment so that people can go in and specifically extract the information that they’re looking for.

We’re still in an exploratory phase, but ultimately, we want to ensure that longstanding archival access to our current LMS exists for the period defined by the governing bodies that require it.

Making Use of D2L Services

As part of our implementation, we purchased a D2L course audit package.

That involves us choosing a small number of courses that our learning design team has had a chance to dive into and that we feel are our gold standard. We’ll share these with D2L; their learning design team will scrutinise and enhance them further.

The hope is that faculty will be able to see the course audit results and strive toward building a course that meets those expectations.

Our teams know their disciplines exceptionally well, and they teach exceptionally well. We put a great deal of time into ensuring our instructors are well-prepared in the classroom through some of our training initiatives. Still, it’s those other components like accessibility and learning design that we want to be more intentional with. I think D2L’s course audit process will be really helpful in this regard.

Missed Part One in this series? Catch up below.

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