You bought up a very good point stefaniesanders, and I love "let Canvas be Canvas". This is an incredibly important concept when migrating between systems, and I've done four! All LMSs are different, but faculty will want them to be the same - just human nature and resistance to change.
We made sure that faculty knew that Canvas "was not your Dad's Oldsmobile", and instead, used the differences as selling points - this is what Canvas will do that Bb could not.
I think that for faculty, the biggest challenge is adapting their person workflows to Canvas. Faculty have very strong feelings about how they manage their time, and I think online faculty have even stronger feelings because initial design/set-up and course management time can be greater when teaching online. When we first migrated to Canvas, we spent a lot of time showing faculty how they accomplish key tasks in Canvas, and even more time simply asking "what do you want to do?" so that we could show them the easiest ways to do it in Canvas.
Moving content is a huge issue, and hrutherford brought up a good point about migrating content - Copy/paste is not a bad idea for much of the content. Using the Import from an Export file can be especially messy moving from Bb. There are too many differences in the basic structure of the functional areas. We found, when migrating from Angel to Canvas, that the clean-up was more time consuming than if they just started from scratch.
- Teach your faculty about the basic structure of Canvas,
- Show them how to set up the skeleton of their course through setting up modules, and including the placeholders for pages, discussions, assignment and quizzes in each module,
- Then have them copy/paste all the content they can into each of these placeholders.
- Then show them how to apply the settings for each content type.
- All the time asking them, "How did you do this in Bb?", "What did you use that for in Bb?";
- Then show them how it might be accomplished in Canvas.
But never, ever tell them an LMS is an LMS, and they all work the same - they will become your worst enemy when they realize they all aren't the same.
KLM
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