Transferring Content to Google Classroom?

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Teacher94
Community Member

I am going to be teaching at a different school where they use Google Classroom instead of Canvas. Can I somehow transfer my content to Google Classroom? Any information/help would be great, thanks! 

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jared
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Not easily, though I can walk you through as far as I can imagine this process going:

First, know that any Canvas course can be exported and downloaded. Canvas uses IMS Common Cartridge (CC) as the basis for its export files, which is supported by many LMSs.

Unfortunately, Google Classroom does not support CC imports. 

Fortunately, a CC exported file is really just a ZIP file full of other files. So if you exported your Canvas course and downloaded the CC export file, all your course files will be inside.

So you could extract any documents or files that you had uploaded into Canvas and then upload those into Google Classroom. I know, not a huge deal since you probably have those files on your computer already!

Any videos you recorded within Canvas should be there, as well.

All your Canvas Pages will be in there, too, as HTML files. Unfortunately I don’t know if Google Classroom supports importing HTML files, though maybe Google Docs does.

Assignments and Discussions will be in there, but not really in a format that Google Classroom is equipped to deal with.

Quizzes will be there as IMS QTI files — another standard that Google Classroom doesn’t currently support.

Canvas course navigation, Modules, etc will be there but not useful because Classroom doesn’t support CC.

If you’re still tracking with me and /still/ want to see how much you can get out of your Canvas course export, first, readHow do I export a Canvas course? in order to create your course export and download it.

Then, after downloading the course export you’ll need to rename the file. It will be named something like yourcoursename.imscc — you’ll want to rename it to yourcoursename.zip — tricky, right?! Then your computer will recognize it as a ZIP file, and you should be able to double-click it to extract all the content and begin exploring.

I’m being a bit vague here on purpose because your computer may handle ZIP files differently than mine, and what you’ll find inside the ZIP package, while standardized, is still a bit too much for me to explain here. But suffice it to say it will be organized enough that you should at least be able to recognize files and pages.

(Here’s a diagram of an IMS CC package, which probably isn’t terribly helpful but I’m providing it just in case.)

From there you can decide if it’s worth trying to bring those files or pages into Classroom. My experience with Classroom is pretty superficial (beyond what I’ve said above re. it’s support for imports) so I’m afraid you’ll be on your own there.

Let us know if you manage to make any progress!

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