In this presentation from the US West Coast Moodle Moot 2011, leaders from California State University that have recently migrated to Moodle discuss their campus decision-making process, the processes and technologies used to migrate content, and their process of implementation. The speakers represent campuses migrating from both Blackboard and WebCT, and a mix of small and large FTE campuses. Activities that benefited from multi-campus coordination and resource sharing are also be discussed.
Presenters:
David Levin, CSU Northridge
Barbara Taylor, CSU San Marcos
Moderator: John Whitmer, CSU Office of the Chancellor
Migrating to Moodle: Lessons Learned from Recent CSU Migrations
1. Migrating to Moodle: Lessons Learned from Recent CSU Migrations Presenters Barbara Taylor, CSU San Marcos David Levin, CSU Northridge Facilitator: John Whitmer, CSU Office of the Chancellor
22. Contact Information Speaker Campus Email Barbara Taylor CSU San Marcos [email_address] David Levin CSU Northridge [email_address]
Notas del editor
2 reasons to switch Looking at substanital change from WebCT CE 6 to BB 9 Tremendous budget reduction to the CSU Process for making the decision: CIO formed a team consisting of database admins, server admins, programmers, and instructional developers. Each group formed a team to investigate what was needed to get Moodle up and running. We setup a server, recruited faculty to be a part of a pilot, and ran the pilot parallel with WebCT in Spring 2010. Faculty in the pilot liked Moodle, found it more intuitive, and more flexible than WebCT.
Tools: We couldn’t find any tools that allowed for the conversion of material from WebCT CE 6 to Moodle 1.9 Now what? What do we really need from WebCT? With ~1500 course to migrate, and only 3 instructional developers, it was not feasible to migrate courses manually. Determined what we really needed to have migrated (if it was possible to pull anything from WebCT & put it into Moodle) List was revised a couple of times. Initial list: Files – thought was we could reorganize material Revised list: Learning Modules, Folders, Discussions, Links, Quizzes Our awesome and amazing programmers (along with our database administrator) found APIs and wrote scripts that enabled us to pull out everything we needed (except quizzes) and migrate it to Moodle. We used Respondus to migrate quizzes/exams.
Developed a website for instructor Showed them a list of course containers they had going back 3 years. They could choose to convert just files or their entire course. We reviewed the list to be sure that at least one copy of every course an instructor had used in the past 3 years was migrated. Website for conversions We had a site that we could choose the year, the subject and the course to convert. We started out with one course at a time and then slowly started adding more courses. We would receive either a “successful conversion” message or an “error” message. Converted 50 courses We converted about 50 courses and then went through a quality assurance testing process to be sure the material had migrated in a way that was similar to how the original course looked. If it failed the conversion we went back to the programmers and they tweaked the script. We then ran another sample of about 150 courses and went through the quality assurance testing process again. Once we were convinced it was as good as we could get it we started the process of migrating the rest of the courses.
Overall our process went pretty smooth. We attacked this project with enthusiasm. During the development process we met weekly as a complete team. Small groups met on an as needed basis.