A month or so ago, I went ahead and zipped up course materials on Blackboard and downloaded that onto my desktop. Then I uploaded the zipped contents into a course shell in ANGEL Learning. And that was as far as I got in terms of transferring curricular contents en masse. I will admit to a great deal of skepticism that this particular organization should just ask faculty to move their own work even though I have instance manager privileges on a different learning management system (LMS). Maybe I’d gotten a bit soft with the administrator support I’d had as a faculty member.

Great Hopes for the LO Repository

I noticed a great empty space for digital learning objects in a repository, which is promising for the learning community (and community of practice) for higher-ed faculty in this particular system.

Rolling out the Digital Contents

After time spent on other projects, I finally found a weekend to deploy the contents. This would mean untangling where the different pieces went…eliminating the computer garbage text with content folders…seeing how they would display to learners…and creating an e-learning path for the materials in a way that would make sense to a new student. There has to be a clear intuitive “walk” through the system.

Everything dumped out into the right buckets, which means that on the back-end, coders and developers have studied both LMSes in depth to make them align so well. The files were clean. The Announcements appeared in the proper areas. The discussion board folders all transferred well and even kept their annotations, which was surprising. Clearly, developers paid close attention to detail for the changeover from one LMS to another.

Thinking about the Branding and Interactivity Next

Now, I’ve got to see how the branding and virtual space design will work in a new system. I’ll have to see how easy the interactivity is. I’m thinking this is a very promising start.