Hey everyone, Chris here from ricoshae.com! Today, we’re diving into something a little different: exporting courses from Moodle to the Canvas LMS. This became a real-world challenge for me when I was tasked with migrating over 40 Moodle courses into Canvas.
For those unfamiliar, Canvas is another excellent Learning Management System developed by Instructure. It boasts some fantastic advantages, and like Moodle, there’s an open-source version available if you’re keen to explore it further. You can even try it out with a free account on Canvas Cloud.
The big questions we’ll tackle today are:
- Can we actually import a Moodle course into Canvas?
- How do we go about doing it?
- What are the advantages, disadvantages, and common issues you might encounter?
I’m going to walk you through the entire process: exporting a course from Moodle, importing it into Canvas, and then highlighting what to look out for and the snags I ran into.
The Export Process: From Moodle to Canvas
Let’s start with a Moodle course I’ve set up called “Practice Course One.” It contains typical content like pages, tasks, quizzes, and an assignment – everything we need to demonstrate the export.
1. Backing Up Your Moodle Course:
In Moodle, navigate to More > Course reuse and select Backup. It’s crucial to remove enrolled users as we only want to transfer the course content, not user data. Then, simply “Jump to final step” and download your backup file once it’s complete.
Importing into Canvas
Now, let’s jump into Canvas. I’ve already set up an account and created a new course called “Demo One.”
2. Importing Content into Canvas:
- Go to Import Course Content.
- Choose Moodle 1.9 2.x as the content type.
- Select your Moodle backup file.
- For the question bank, I recommend creating a new one (e.g., “Default”) as this is where all your quiz questions will be stored.
- Tick All content to ensure everything is imported.
- Click Import.
The import process involves two main steps: uploading the file and then Canvas processing and converting the Moodle content. This happens in the background, so it can take a little while.
Post-Import Validation and Adjustments
Immediately after import, Canvas might flag “missing links.” To get a comprehensive overview, I always recommend going to Settings > Validate Links in Content and starting a link validation. This scans every piece of content for broken links.
Common Issues and Solutions:
- Broken Internal Links: A common issue is direct links to other Moodle courses (e.g., course/view.php?id=3). These won’t work in Canvas because it’s a different system. You’ll need to manually edit these pages and remove or update the links.
- Font Awesome Icons: Unfortunately, Font Awesome icons generally do not transfer over.
- Bootstrap Styling (Partial): Some Bootstrap elements, like borders and basic layout, might come across, but more complex features like cards or specific formatting might not. Alerts, however, seem to transfer well.
- Quizzes: This is a big one. While the quiz structure and questions are imported into the question bank, the questions aren’t automatically added to the quiz itself. You’ll need to go into each quiz, edit questions, and then find questions from your newly imported question bank to rebuild the quiz. This is inconvenient, but at least you don’t have to recreate the questions from scratch.
- Assignments: Assignments generally import well, with their basic settings like point values.
- Course Completion: Moodle’s course completion settings do not transfer directly to Canvas in the same way. You’ll need to reconfigure any completion tracking within Canvas.
- Embedded Content (e.g., CodePen): Be aware that some embedded content, like CodePen, might not display correctly in Canvas. Embedded videos, however, usually work fine.
The Bottom Line
Exporting a course from Moodle to Canvas is largely a painless exercise, but it does require some post-import cleanup and adjustment. While certain elements like Font Awesome and some Bootstrap functions don’t make the jump perfectly, a significant amount of content does, saving you a lot of time.
Hopefully, this guide has been helpful in navigating your Moodle-to-Canvas migration! See you in the next video.