From Canvas to Moodle

Migration

There is no option to migrate from Instructure Canvas to Moodle by exporting courses from Canvas and importing those courses into Moodle. Canvas exports courses as Instructional Management Systems Common Cartridge version 1.1 files. Moodle only imports IMS Common Cartridge 1.0 files. The versions are incompatible and as far as this author is aware there are no converters between the versions.

IMSCC 1.0 is a 2008 standard and IMSCC 1.1 dates back to 2011 or earlier. In other words, both versions are out of date. The current version is IMSCC 1.3 and IMSCC 1.4 is under development. Neither Instructure nor Moodle appear to be working on code to handle any newer IMS CC version. The inability to easily move courses between learning management systems benefits vendor lock in.

As a result, migration is a heavy lift manual process of rebuilding element-by-element from a blank sheet. Or one can pay a third party significant sums of money to handle the migration. This tends to keep institutions from leaving a learning management system platform.

Playlists

The following are links to playlists that this author found helpful.

Moodle produces a series of videos that introduce the features of Moodle 4.5. Perhaps binge watch the entire playlist on a rainy afternoon and then go back to view the specific features of interest.

DELTA (Digital Education and Learning Technology Applications) LearnTech at North Carolina State University has Moodle videos in direct support of the collegiate classroom. DELTA LearnTech's Moodle 4 videos provide step-by-step coverage of specific Moodle 4 topic areas. Moodle 4.3 is substantively similar to the current version 4.5.

Moodle 4 came out in April 2022 and featured an extensive change of the user interface from Moodle 3. Moodle 4 adopted a course home page design similar to that of Canvas. Thus videos that are more than two years old are not going to be helpful.

For those who prefer reading over watching, the DELTA LearnTech Moodle knowledge base document collection is extensive and searchable.

Moodle also has community forums much as Canvas did. The forums are actually running in a Moodle.

For those who want to dive into open issues and ongoing developer work under the hood of Moodle, Moodle has an open issues tracking system. For example, learning that MathML is not yet supported in the code editor Tiny.

The workaround is to use LaTeX notation.

Moodle App

Moodle has a mobile app in phone app stores with the icon seen above.

Copying and pasting text with images between the platforms does not move images

I am doing a lot of copying and pasting from Canvas to Moodle. Copying and pasting text and image content from Canvas to Moodle appears straightforward. Drag-select the material to be copied in Canvas and then use the usual keyboard shortcut for copying.

Here the introduction in a Canvas page is being copied. The whole page was selected by drag-selection and keyboard copy. Then the material was pasted into a Moodle Page* using the keyboard shortcut for pasting:

Everything appears to have come over from Instructure. A look at the source code, however, suggests a future issue.

Note in line two that the source of the image is back in the Instructure cloud for the course from which the copy was made. The image is being rendered because the Single Sign On for Canvas is the same as Moodle. The image is not in Moodle. Users without authorized access to the Canvas course in that term will not see the image. Eventually the course will be deleted from Canvas along with all images.

To move the image right-click on the image in Canvas, save the image to the desktop, delete the copied and pasted image in Moodle, and then upload the image from the desktop into Moodle. The resulting code will show that the image is now hosted in Moodle.

*Moodle has both Pages and Books. The actual work was moving the material into a Moodle Book, here a Moodle Page is being used for demonstration purposes.

Preventing the embedding of videos

The Moodle multimedia plugin automatically embeds YouTube videos whenever a link is detected in a text field such as in a page or description text field. There are situations in which this behavior is not desirable, such as a paragraph of text with links from words in the paragraph to YouTube videos. Use View Source to add embed=no%26 between the ? and the v= in the YouTube link.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBHIO60whNw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">

becomes

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?embed=no%26v=TBHIO60whNw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">

The %26 is URL encoding for the ampersand character and is necessary for the link to operate properly.

In one instance the %26 code failed. No amount of trouble shooting was able to resolve the issue. The solution was to use the HTML character encoding of & rather than %26. This is something I have encountered before but the source of the issue is a puzzle.

Auto-linking

"Auto-linking is a feature by which words or phrases used within a Moodle site are automatically linked to glossary or database entries, or activity and resources within the course with the same name."

Auto-linking means that activities and resources should have unique names and that, as one composes, one should remain aware that auto-linking will occur only after saving a page, book, or other text block. Note that auto-linking does not occur for resources that start with an emoji. Thus a page named "🎞 Links to Slides" will not be discovered by the auto-link system. To auto-link to such a page, the first character cannot be an emoji. The page "Links to Slides 🎞" does appear to generate functioning auto-links.

Odd Ends

There is a lot to learn and many subtleties. An early gotcha for me included Scales (which attach to Outcomes) must be entered from lowest ranking to highest ranking: No evidence, Suboptimal, Sufficient, Optimal. Once a Scale is attached to an outcome there appears to be no way to detach the Scale other than to delete the Outcome and start over.

Another gotcha was that once an outcome is attached to an assignment or quiz from the settings screen, that outcome cannot be deleted from that same screen after saving. To delete the outcome one has to go into the Grades -> Grade Setup to delete the outcome.

As soon as questions are created, they are loaded into the Question Banks. Questions can only be duplicated in the Question Bank. Knowing this can be a real time saver. Once duplicated and edited, the question cannot be added to the quiz or test from the Question Bank screen. You have to return to the Quiz or Test to add questions in the Question Bank.

Rubrics

I am building Rubrics on a one-off basis as I have yet to learn how to manage and reuse Rubrics. As far as I can tell, outcomes cannot live in Rubrics. How Rubrics, Outcomes, and Scales will interact and present themselves to me is something I do not expect to know until I have students submitting assignments.

Rubrics, updated. Rubrics can be reused but the terminology and processes differ vastly from Canvas. To start the process of using or reusing a rubric, set the Grade method to rubric when setting up an assignment.

As soon as the assignment is saved with the Rubric option checked, one is automatically taken to a screen to either build a new rubric or generate one from a template.

This area is also accessible from Advanced Grading. Building a new rubric is relatively straightforward. Reusing an existing rubric is rather non-obvious to a Canvas user. The option "Create new grading form from a template" is the path to reusing a pre-existing rubric. In the following always remember to scroll down every time the screen changes. Scroll down, scroll down, when in doubt, scroll down. This is because Moodle inevitably returns one to the top of a page when the dialog box one needs is near the bottom.

After choosing to create a new grading form from a template, scroll down to see the above. Strangely enough, the "include my own forms" checkbox is unchecked by default. To see your own rubrics, check that box. Why isn't that checked by default? Then click on Search. Although it might appear that nothing has happened except to bounce you to the top of a page, scroll down.

If all has gone well, your pre-existing rubrics should be near the bottom of the page. Below the rubric you want to reuse, check Use this form as a template. And, again, you may now be bounced to the top of the page and puzzled at why nothing appears to have happened. Scroll down. Note if you attempt to leave this page you will get a Leave page? warning. This is because there is an open dialog box below. Do not leave the page. Scroll down.

Down the page is where you confirm the reuse of the rubric, referred to as a template or grading form. Notice that the word rubric is completely absent from the dialog box as well as other places. Moodle apparently considers these to be grading forms. One caveat: the various rubric settings will be grayed out, unchangeable, in the reused rubric. If you need new rubric settings then you will need to make a new rubric. I have yet to grok those settings, so I have been leaving them set at default. I may live to regret this.

Submissions and Moodle Grader 10 December

For students submitting gdocs and gsheets from the college Google Workspace for Education there is Google LTI connection available in the Moodle file picker. This opens a Google Drive file picker that, at present, does not display all files in a student's Google Drive. The workaround is that the student should enter the name of the file in the search box and then click on search to display the desired file. Partial matches work in the search box.

Mathematical equations in Moodle 10 December

There is a math equation editor in Moodle that produces and inserts TeX into Moodle resources and activities. The graphical user interface does not include access to all of the capabilities of Tek. Moodle has a support document that cover the use of TeX in Moodle. The only element that I did not see in the support document is \text{} which I use in physical science formulas. Note too that equations in TeX can be entered directly into the editor without using the math equation widget. The equation does not display until you save the page. If you are writing your own TeX in the editor and want to check the syntax, you can select the TeX statement, open the math equation editor, and the equation editor will display the formatted TeX.

Assignment round trip marking with rubric and outcomes 11 December

After setting up a scale, outcomes, and then a rubric, I was able to round trip mark an assignment with both a rubric marking the assignment and course level outcomes being evaluated.

In the above screenshot I am in student mode and I click on the Add icon. The assignment to be submitted is a Google Docs assignment in the college Workspace for Education.

The Google File Picker does not show all folders or files in the drive by default. A search for the title of the document is necessary.

The search has located the file. Looking forward I can see that I need some sort of unique identifier system for filenames to help students find files.

There is an interstitial file picker screen where the students have to choose a license. This may be confusing to a few students.

There is a final step where the student must click on Save changes to submit the document. Back in the instructor role a blue Grade button has appeared. This opens the Moodle Grader.

The rubric can be seen on the lower right.

The right side panel did not appear to have a movable "left wall" but at the top right of the rubric is a "full screen" icon that expands the rubric.

Below the rubric are the course level outcomes that were linked to the assignment.

The rubric is marked by clicking on the rubric, as in Canvas.

A drop down list allows the outcome to be marked.

There is one potential gotcha here: the Save changes button must be clicked on for the grade to be saved. This button is likely to be off the bottom of the screen on a laptop. In Moodle the mantra is "When in doubt, scroll down. Scroll down."

This leads to a confirmation screen.

Below the grade points is the marked rubric. Note that the rubric description appears here.

The comment I made in the grader ("Feedback") appears below the rubric. Outcomes are not reported on this screen.

In Grades there is now an Outcomes report.

This report appears to be an aggregate report. I did not see anything similar to the Learning Mastery Gradebook, but then I also have no actual students in this course.

Note that Moodle appears to have assigned points to the outcomes. That is not something I saw as an option when I set up the outcomes. Also, Moodle has chosen a number scale that appears to be 4, 3, 2, and 0.

Edit: After a deeper dive I think Moodle is using No evidence (1), Suboptimal (2), Sufficient (3), and Optimal (4). Scales apparently set up monotonically starting at one. There is a distinction in the documentation between normalized and sum aggregation, but perhaps that option is not enabled in the college Moodle as I did not see an aggregation option. And the Standard scale checkbox is disabled.

The zero above threw me off, but that zero is an artifact of SC130.2 not having. been evaluated yet. Those are the course averages on the 4 point monotonic scale. Which makes some sense. Although I was using a 5,4,3,0 scale so my outcomes could be used to mark assignments in Canvas, a zero (No evidence) had a disproportionate impact on a student's average. Put another way, a student with one No Evidence and one Optimal has an average of 2.5 which is below Suboptimal. On a four point monotonic scale they would have a (1+4)/2 = 2.5 but now that 2.5 is between Suboptimal and Sufficient. I had thought about this issue even in Canvas but hadn't decided on a way to address this.

This is also underneath the logic of school systems that now set a floor of 50% on grades. A 50% is the new zero. Same logic. A student with a score of 0 and 100 has a 50% average, an F. By making 50% the new zero the same student has (50+100)/2 = 75 or a C. Put another way, in the first case the average of an F and an A is an F, but the 50% floor system means that the average of an A and an F is a C. So I get the monotonic scale. Which also means that outcomes then cannot be used to generate scores for grading. Because Suboptimal is not the same as failing, but 2/4 is failing.

The Outcomes are set to a scale (once used in an assignment, the scale cannot be edited nor changed, so design well before you attached outcomes to assignments).

The scale provided no indication that any numbers were being attached to the scale. So this is an area into which I need to take a deeper dive before getting too much further into setting up my course. Edit: this was written before the earlier edit. This is a stream of spaghetti consciousness post.

Canvas Learning Mastery gradebook. As far as I could tell there also was not outcomes results export report that would provide the student-by-student achievement of outcomes information that Canvas provides. But, again, with students in the course next term perhaps something else will become available.

Ungraded activities 12 December

Set a maximum of zero points and you get an ungraded activity such as a survey. An option that I do not recall being directly available in Canvas is that one can set an activity to zero weight in the grade book but still have the activity show points - think a practice test where you want the students to see a score but do not the practice test to count. Lane Community College covers this.

Question bank categories 12 December

I am struggling to understand how question bank organization decisions will impact me in a year or two. I have stumbled through some information that may come back to haunt me.

One is a vague reference to ID numbers being necessary for embedding of question bank questions in quizzes that is hidden under Create Questions from Inside the Question Bank.

The other thing I have seen is that tags may be important for filtering later. I have 90 questions in a single "Basic statistics" question bank in MS 150 Statistics. Filtering may turn out to be important if these banks grow from term to term. I haven't been setting tags, but I can see a Filter by Moodle Tags in screen 5 of a slide show embedded under "Add questions from a Question Bank" on University of New South Wales help guide. The UNSW site has some nice embedded slide shows that demonstrate features more more succinctly than most videos.

Numeric questions 12 December

For multiple choice questions the status of a student answer is included in the yellow box below.

For the numeric question type the yellow box can lead the student to believe that their answer is wrong. What the student cannot see is that the error is set to 0.5. This answer is correct. This is shown at the upper left in the gray box.

But if the question is sufficiently long, the gray box on the left will have scrolled up off screen and is not visible to the student. Some students will see a situation such as the above, where they answered 733 and then see that the correct answer was 732.776. Students should quickly adapt to this, but there could be some confusion and consternation on the first quiz or two.

Rebalancing

As far as I can determine, course learning outcomes cannot be included in marking rubrics and cannot contribute points to an assignment. This dropped 20 points from my physical science laboratory report marking rubrics and reduced the most frequently used rubric from 45 points to 25 points. As a result the quizzes were pushing up towards 50% of the grade, but my emphasis is on doing science, so I wanted more weight in the laboratory reports. I could have adjusted the laboratory report points, but the scale and rubrics I use makes sense to me. I could differentially weight laboratory reports in the gradebook, but past experience with weighting convinced me that students have a harder time comprehending how any one item affects their grade when weights are being applied. I prefer the points to carry the weight naturally. So that meant throttling back the quiz points. Rather than two points per quiz question I shifted to one point for multiple choice, two points for a numeric calculation answer, and one point per matching item (they were two points). This seems to help rebalance my gradebook.

No submission assignments cannot be marked with a rubric

Non-submission assignments (in class presentations, in class work done on paper) does not appear to be able to have a description or be marked using a rubric. This is impacting assignments such as my laboratory nine where I cover clouds and have the students attempt to mimic Luke Howard and draw a scientifically accurate depiction of a cloud type. This exercise is usually used to introduce an art rubric to the elementary pre-teacher prep students who often population my class. I use the laboratory as a way of demonstrating a science lab that could be done from the youngest grades. Teachers teach as they were taught, not as they were told to teach. Which is why I do not believe in instructional methods courses. Back when I was in school studies showed that teachers fell back on how they were taught despite whatever they learned in a methods course. So I don't tell the pre-teacher prep students to engage in drawing as a part of science class, I have them draw. If I want future teachers to do something in their classroom, then they have to have done it in my classroom. In other words, physical science is a science methods course.

I am still wrestling with how to handle laboratory nine because the drawing is not submitted, I cannot easily figure out how to get a rubric in. And I am not sure the grader will let one mark when no submission has come in. Some of my "round trip" testing of submissions has been ambiguous as to whether one can open the grader in the absence of a submission. For now the rubric is in the textbook and marking is straight points.

One other side effect of no submission items in Moodle not being an assignment: they only appear in the gradebook and cannot be surfaced on the course homepage so far as I can tell.

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