As we think about how we are going to bring over our Blackboard courses to Canvas, we are wondering how many semesters of courses do you bring over to Canvas?

[debbie_ellis]

We are in the process of determining how we are going to bring over our Blackboard courses to Canvas. In our discussion someone asked how many semesters of Blackboard courses we should bring over to Canvas. What would be a typical number?

Also, do you keep all of the archives from your previous LMS? We have a good 14 years of courses archived and another 4 on our production server. That represents a lot of gigs of courses! What is the best practice for saving archived courses? If it makes a difference, we are located in Illinois.

[kiporter]

We moved from Moodle to Canvas.  We imported into Canvas all courses from the previous year and courses in our general categories. Instructors could then easily copy the content in Canvas from last year's course into the course shell for the new semester.  We also exported all of our courses from Moodle and saved on a file share.  In cases where a course is only taught every other year, we received requests to grab the old export file and import it into Canvas so the instructor could use it for the new course.

[sharon_kitching]

We moved from blackboard to Canvas. Moved over 18 months. About 6000 courses. We moved the previous year Blackboard to the current year on Canvas and did a sweep of the units that are only run once every 2 years. 

All previous years (seven years) we kept as archive files that we restore on demand in case of appeals/missing assignments/content. The restore process creates a site with content in Canvas, or a HTML site with gradebook info (depending on what info they are looking for).