 Good afternoon. My name is Joost. I was supposed to attend this meeting until last week, we received a really unfortunate news of the presenter who sadly passed away last Wednesday. I've been working with the project, I know the project, and I've been working with him with Ruth Habetz, who was an application administrator for Blackboard previous to moving to Moodle, and he prepared the presentation very well. So I'll try to take you through the slides and talk about how a university of applied sciences successfully moved from Blackboard to Moodle. So moving from Moodle from Blackboard. First of all, these are the topics I'm going to talk about. What is outside university? There's some decision making to go through before you can actually move from one LMS to another one, so there's a lot of steps prior to going to Moodle. I'll talk about the actual migration, the challenges we faced, and how we solved them, and then I'll look briefly ahead to the future what Moodle will bring for this university of applied sciences when they institution-wide implemented Moodle as their core LMS solution. So let's have a look. Yes, outside university is not really a big university of applied sciences, they only have 13,000 students across three campuses in the southern part of the Netherlands, and one of the comments that struck me most when we started talks with the outside university team is that they said, well, if it's about innovation, we're not really front runners. We like to take things easy, look at how things are developing, so now we're in a position where we are actually the first university of applied sciences leaving Blackboard for another LMS Moodle, and that's really a big challenge, and it's really interesting to do that. So they have three campuses in Heerlen, in Maastricht, and it's all in the southern part, the province of Limburg, really laid back people, they only have 1,700 people in staff, of which just over 1,100 are teaching staff, university professors, and then 571 non-teaching staff. Two of those were the application administrators for Blackboard, who are now taking upon themselves to manage Moodle. Well, one of them sadly passed away, but they'll have a replacement when they're ready for that. So they have a lot of programs in the university of applied sciences, a broad program from healthcare to management studies, hospitality management, international business, IT and communications, they do the lot, and they have all bachelor's degrees, some master's degrees programs they teach, so it's really, we say a university of applied sciences because they don't focus on fundamental research, they focus on professional career building programs. So they have a long history with Blackboard, they spent over a decade collecting really useful syllabi courses in Blackboard. As you can see, they had up to 100,000 user accounts in there, so they didn't have the processes yet to clean that up, to have just the active user base. They had 44,000 courses in there and well over a terabyte in data on their locally on-premise servers, which poses some challenges when you want to migrate that to a software as a service solution in the cloud, as you can imagine. So they had this long contract and decided it was time to leave Blackboard for a new solution and in February, in the fall of 2017, they opened a call for interested parties to enter in a contract negotiation and they had to describe what functional and technological requirements were there. So legal requirements with the GDPR coming into place last May in 2018 was well announced. There were some functional requirements on behalf of the University of Applied Sciences and there was a lot of functional design, also already being described. They had a really well-prepared project leader as well, who is a well-known person in the Netherlands in educational technology and sciences. This is what they decided should be their support structure for the project. They have the project board, they have a project manager, of course there's the education and support team and there's the student support team and then for all the the academies teaching the subject matter, they had LMS coaches as they called them. The people who talked to the teachers on how the new LMS or any LMS they choose would improve their work on a daily basis. It's not just a matter of installing the software and then saying well it's there, go use it. We've heard that before. I think Martin also mentioned that in his keynote, that it's not about the application, it's about what the people actually do with it and you need some coaching and play some teaching on how to use the activities, the structures to your benefits. So this is what they decided. Timeline on their preparation is this. In the fall of 2017, the course owners had to list which courses should be left out of the migration for the academic year 1819. The academic year we're actually in right now. Then that was used for preparation, a cleanup of blackboards so only the useful courses would be there to be migrated to Moodle. Then of course we did a database to database migration which is a challenge and we have really good developers at our headquarters in Eindhoven who took upon themselves the challenge to convert a blackboard course into a Moodle workable course. We tested the migration toolkit in January, successful testing, some tweaks and then in February we actually moved the entire lot over 2,000 courses from blackboard to Moodle and created them in Moodle with all the course data, the text, the images, the media, the assignments there, everything in preparation for the academic year 1819 the year we're in. Directly afterwards we started onboarding the teachers together with the teaching support staff of South University. We had this onboarding program of four weeks to get the new teachers acquainted with Moodle with all the tools, well the essential tools to manage a course and to get them acquainted with the migrated blackboard courses in Moodle because well it's the same content but it looks slightly different and you can do other stuff with it so you need to know what to work with. Over the course of spring of last year we also started building the integration, some of them were really easy it's just installing and configuring a plugin like eForce but OSIRIS which is a student information system and enrollment platform is a bit more of a challenge so it's more of an API kind of integration. We had a SAML2 interface with surf connects with it which is federated authentication and of course one of the requirements was to not only provide with an LMS but they used the portfolio functionality of of blackboard in some faculties. We have a package deal we provide Mahara as well and integrate that because the circle of submitting to Moodle getting it graded and assessed moving it to your portfolio and then having the portfolio assessed at the end of a year or at the end of your program is a really useful cycle. Identity authentication management everything was set up so the institution wide implementation could start by the zero week beginning well August 2018. Just before that we we promised them not only to move the course data but also all the evidence of submitted work graded work the students had already submitted during their program in Moodle or in blackboard so they could could still see it after blackboard was no longer accessible. So their assignment last feedback from the from the teachers is really useful to have when blackboard got shut down in December last year. You need access to that stuff. You just can't leave it out. It's a history. You may leave it out eventually but you need to take it with you. Anything but the kitchen sink basically. So let's have a look at what what a typical blackboard course in the South University of Applied Sciences instance of blackboard looked like. It's a bit more than just a file repository things we see in LMS is that people put their presentations there structure menu and then that's a course. What we have is a complex structure for the course in navigation menus with sub menus and tool access but it's not really a pedagogical line of teaching. It's just you find your files here. You find your forums there. You find your discussions here. Here's a webcast. Good luck with that. It's a lot of navigation and it's not not really in the logic of the student. Some of the blackboard courses that we had to migrate were well over eight gigabytes in data and they contained large media files and that's where we we found this really interesting challenge to have a Moodle course format that actually helps access those those course materials with an with an acceptable page load time. So we we created a course format that's based on the I think the flex sections course format. It's called multi tabs which actually does dynamic page loads only for the sections you're in. So if you have a course with 70 sections it will only load section 65 if you were last there and not the other 64 which helps students actively access their course materials in the time they need to. The menu there is a is collapsible so it has sections sub sections sub sub sections and it replicates the behavior of a typical blackboard course otherwise in a topics format this course would be like an endless scroll of death going to the lowest to the bottom section if it's really useful to have there. Let's see final slides. This one we already saw some challenges were there of course if you have a large implementation you're bound to run into some interesting stuff. Some courses were really slow but that was because there was a really large size to them. One program in the music Bachelor of Music and Arts had the entire bachelor's in one course including differentiations for teaching or music as a profession challenging indexing a Moodle site with that much content on it with global search obviously if you if you start using that can lead to challenges and occasionally the search bar would crash. We solved that also the sending receiving email functionality from Moodle. We set that up with site University of Applied Sciences connected it to their Azure Stack mail client and then it worked as it should and they're now actively teaching. I'll skip to through this one because this is I still have a few minutes left. I'd like to look ahead ahead. What they want to do over the next year they're developing courses that will actively use the competency framework structure. They will also implement more of a connection between Mahara the portfolio and Moodle assignments and forums wherever they can because collecting evidence in today's higher education is more important than passing a test. It's a more individual learning route so it pays to pay attention for that. Another one is to just get rid of all the unused unused user accounts that still had to be migrated but that's in the larger scheme of things also a question of having their active directory cleaned up and then the connections lost between the LMS and the rest of the applications. That in turn will lead to a better used LMS with a better results and a happier teaching staff which in the end is the most one of the most important user groups there. The students themselves are really enthusiastic about it and it's a total shift from what they were used to in Blackboard. That was my presentation so thank you very much for your time and there is some time for questions left. Thank you very much and I love the final slide absolutely so yeah we can have a couple of questions over at the back first and then and then Bob at the front yeah okay. Hi thank you for the presentation. I just want to ask why you did move from Blackboard to Middle. What was the reasons? One of the reasons was that over the course of time the requirements for a new LMS changed. The organizational requirements put forward that they wanted to do more online teaching more blended programs and Blackboard does not their Blackboard instance was not really facilitating that kind of shift in educational approach so that was one and the other one was that it's a it's a tendered contract that had been extended for the maximum number of times so they had to look for new new providers and OpenAD the company I work for was the only one there. Hi yeah you mentioned the course format that you went with for Moodle. Can you say what it is again because I didn't quite catch it? Well it's called multi-tops but it's one of the things we provide as an extra service for the for the clients we have so it's not openly available. Okay so shall we well is it you next yeah okay you you have to be the last person right last person that's right there. I just wondered if there was any cleanup afterwards of the course as we did a migration from one day based on other and it was I don't know if I would do it again to be quite honest and also the course format that we ended up going with we've been stuck with we can't really change so I just wondered it sounds as though your database migration was very clean and there was no cleanup afterward. Well there was a cleanup before before we migrated that there was enough time in in the planning for the teachers to clean up their their attics basically and just have the course materials that needed needed to be moved going to Moodle. A lot of what we moved is actually archived so it's not actively used in educational programs but it's there for reference and they took the courses we migrated and turned them into fully functional newly designed courses based on the materials we migrated. Thank you. Thank you very much again I'm sure you'd be happy to answer any of the questions over lunch and that is the end of this morning's session. We're back here at 1.30 so please come back and listen to some more and thanks to yours and everyone thank you.