Moodle Access After Migrating to Canvas

[BrianChambers]

We’re interested in how other institutions that moved from Moodle to Canvas handled the historical content that was not migrated. If you’re one of these institutions, we’re wondering:

• Do/did you host a retired version of Moodle on site?
• Did you outsource the hosting of a Moodle instance and, if so, which vendor do you use? 
• What type of archival access do you offer to your users?
• How frequently do your users request archived content?

[nwilson7]

@BrianChambers We did a phased out approach.  Our University is made up (or was at the time) of 6 colleges.  We picked 3 colleges and they moved from Moodle to Canvas in Fall semester, during this time both systems were provisioned and ultimately could be used.  Faculty were allowed to move early but had to get special permission to not move and we had about 75% actually make the move in the Fall.  The Spring we moved the other 3 colleges.  The Moodle server was run for 1 more year but no classes or users were provisioned so people could access their data but not use it to instruct from.  After that we set Moodle up with a different URL and essentially locked out the users.  By request, someone could be given a unique URL to access their content or we would go in for them and pull the content (normally much easier and faster) and we allowed this for 1 year (this is year 2 after full Canvas adoption).  After that point, we turned the Moodle server off.  We have a data retention policy of 5 years for this type of data so the server could still be turned back on and our IT staff can access content.  For the first 3 or so semesters that it was off  we would get about 1 request a semester for data but then everyone moved on successfully.

We did lots of communication and even used wording to make it sound like it would be very difficult to get any data after that first year.  We held trainings and open sessions to help people backup and move data to Canvas and created several sandboxes for people to store Moodle data in Canvas just in case they may need it.

Hope this helps!

Nick

[BrianChambers]

Thanks, Nick! This is helpful. I'll let you know if we have any follow-up questions.

[BethCrook]

Hi @BrianChambers! I don't have any insight to offer, but based on your question, I assume you are new to the community. So hello and welcome!

[JasonSimmons]

Hello Brian,

K16 Solutions is a close partner of Instructure and offers an archiving solution for those institutions that have migrated to Canvas.

Rather than paying for an expensive read-only version of your Moodle instance or using cold storage. Scaffold Archiving allows institutions to archive their historical course content and student data on a platform that fully integrates with Canvas.

Course content and student data can easily move from the archives to Canvas and vice versa.  I'm happy to get you in touch with former Moodle customers that are using this solution, or get you in touch with my colleague who can demo this solution for you.

You can read several customer stories here of those customers that have migrated and then archived using our services.

Thanks,
Jason Simmons, SVP, K16 Solutions