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Teaching Resources

Prepping Your Course For Our Move to Canvas

While preparing and teaching your final few semesters in Moodle, a little prep work will make the move to Canvas more more smooth.

In this article

Why prepare now?

It’s likely that you’ve experienced a relocation in the past. Did you declutter your belongings before moving? Empty the back of that closet, or that overstuffed kitchen drawer? Did it make unpacking and organizing your new space easier? You can experience analogous benefits in decluttering and preparing your course, especially if you plan to import parts (or even your entire) Moodle course into a Canvas space.

We suggest:

  • Taking stock of your Moodle course to identify items that will be a bit different in Canvas
  • Identifying and perhaps removing things that you don’t want to bring with you to Canvas
  • Reorganizing some content to ensure that it comes over in as useful a state as possible.

Note: Most of our faculty evaluators have found that a combination of importing elements from a Moodle course and recreating elements in Canvas has been the easiest way to move. It will be possible to do a whole course import from Moodle, if you so choose. Preparatory work in Moodle will benefit both approaches.

Step 1: Take stock

We’ve created a Prepping Your Moodle Course for Canvas checklist to help you audit what is in your course and prepare it for your move. Use the instructions under the “My course audit” to get started taking stock and identifying items that would benefit from decluttering. One thing to note is that very large courses (>2 GB) will need to be downsized to import any of their content.

Screenshot of the My Course Audit table on the checklist

Step 2: Review and work through preparation tasks

Things to know and do for each item listed in the Audit table are found in the second table on the checklist, organized by type of Moodle content.

  1. In the column labeled, “Item,” find an item in your course. The links in the “In my course?” column of the Course Audit Table you just used will take you to the right spot.
  2. Read across the row for the item. The recommended tasks are organized by whether you’re doing a whole course import, selective import, or recreating the items manually in Moodle. How these tasks look may help you decide the right pathway for you! The last column has both some pre-populated notes and information as well as a place to take your own notes.
  3. As you work through tasks, check them off on this table. Return to the “My Course Audit” table and update the “Preparation Status” column to either “In Progress” or “Ready.”

Conclusion

By investing time in taking stock, planning and preparing, you’re ensuring that preparing your course for it’s first semester in its new Canvas home will be as smooth as possible.