Professional Services > Content Migration > Managing the Cost of Change

Content Migration

NetSpot provides accurate and fast migration of content from a variety of
Learning Management Systems to Moodle. The migration service NetSpot
provides is more reliable than alternative approaches as it involves a direct and fully automated migration.

Smooth Transition
One of the key considerations in moving to Moodle from another Learning Management System (LMS) is content migration. In the context of eective change management, institutions will often look to minimise the time, cost and inconvenience to faculty of making the move. It is not unusual for faculty to be more concerned about managing content migration than the implementation of Moodle.

Moving to Moodle is a good opportunity for staff development and reection on how courses are taught online. The new course design may well be better than that provided in the legacy LMS. However, not all stakeholders embrace change with the same energy and enthusiasm and the ability to migrate content from a legacy LMS to Moodle remains an important 'box to tick' in the review process and may have a signicant eect in the successful implementation of the change.

Low Risk, High Return
Content migration is a one-o cost. Due to the number of migrations NetSpot have done, we can perform the migration quickly, accurately and therefore cost-eectively.
In larger installations where courses are in the hundreds and thousands, NetSpot's automated process reduces risk by avoiding a lengthy manual process which could result in errors.

NetSpot's approach to Content Migration
Because of NetSpot's long history in Learning Management Systems, we have been able to automate migration by following a three step process.

1. An initial migration of representative courses for customer testing;

2. A post migration consultancy where issues with the current batch are discussed with the client and suggestions are made, following which improvements to the migration output may be performed based on customer feedback;

3. Final batch migration of courses (indicative turn-around time is 5 business days). The customer supplies NetSpot LMS backup les via FTP and NetSpot performs the conversion and provides the customers with Moodle backup files.

Support
Varying levels of content migration are supported depending on which LMS the courses are being migrated from. Below is an example:

Files (Legacy LMS)
Moodle: All files and folders from the File Manager are migrated to the Files area within Moodle and the folder structure is retained.

Quizzes (Legacy LMS)
Moodle: Assessments of type Quiz and Self Test are migrated to Quizzes within Moodle. Examples are:
Types eg:

• True False, Multiple Choice, Fill in the Blanks Attributes eg :
• Question name, Question text, Answers Settings eg :
• Title, Description, Grading method
  

Content Modules (Legacy LMS)
Moodle: Items within Content Modules are added to Topics within Moodle as resources or activities. The following Item types are currently migrated:

• Files (become file resources)
• Headings (become label resources)
• Custom Icons
• Assessments (Quiz and Self Test types) (become quiz activities)
• Web Link (become link resources)
• Assignments (become Assignment activities)
• Discussions (become Forum activities)
• Chats (become Chat activities)
  

Folders (Legacy LMS)
Moodle: The Header and Footer are migrated to Labels in Moodle. The same Item types as for Content Modules are migrated.

Assignments (Legacy LMS)
Moodle: Migrated as Assignments (as 'Advanced Upload' type)

Announcements (Legacy LMS)
Moodle: Migrated as a Forum. Messages for recipients other than Students are migrated to a separate hidden Forum.

Discussions (Legacy LMS)
Moodle: Topics migrated as Forums

• Title & Description migrated

Chat (Legacy LMS)
Moodle: Migrated as Chat Rooms

Web Links (Legacy LMS)
Moodle: Migrated as Resources (web links). Web Link categories
are migrated.

Glossary (Legacy LMS)
Moodle: Migrated as a Glossary

Groups (Legacy LMS)
Moodle: Migrated as Groups

Customer Spotlight

NetSpot recently worked with an Australian University to perform a trial conversion of LMS courses backed up from a well known proprietary LMS into Moodle, including over 30,000 quiz questions stored in a large question bank.

Not only did NetSpot's migration process convert these courses and all quiz questions in under a day, NetSpot then worked collaboratively with academic staff at the university to refine and improve the migration process until the migrated courses satisfied the needs of academic staff.

Taking into account an average of five minutes to manually convert one quiz question alone, NetSpot's migration process saved approximately 2,500 hours of manual conversion effort.