Random things that worked

My goodness! It actually worked.  Here’s a grab bag of thoughts about converting Canvas subjects to Moodle.

3 Phases of build: Admin – Base – Content

When there are only a few of us on the project, or people change, or work only part time, dividing a subject’s development into three distinct phases really enable us to be flexible.

Lots of Developers

Having more than 4 people on the project allowed specialisation to emerge. It allowed both a content and a quiz point person to onboard new developers and to provide support. It also freed me to refine and develop processes and continue work on transitioning subject.

MS Teams

Universal acceptance of MS Teams as a method of organising the project for developers: files, comms and platforms.

Development Server

Having Moodle on a development server provide to be a great resource for:

• Trialling Moodle Plugins quickly and safely.
• Flexibility in process, e.g. export questions or make back-ups
• Speed in creating subjects.

Tools

Any who has hung around with tech for a while will have a grab bag of favourite utilities. A recent surprise was Adobe Acrobat Pro – it has a facility to export to HTML, splitting pages into html at wherever you place a bookmark. The exported files are the perfect format for importing into Moodle Books. However, before importing into Moodle Books, tools like Dreamweaver and or Atom Editor can quickly clean the html – which saves a lot of time in Moodle.

People

A project like this doesn’t happen without good, talented people. A diverse group all who provide different insight, caringly covers your own blind spots and shares great ideas for making this project quicker and easier but more importantly, transfer the good student learning experience from Canvas to Moodle.