I have volunteered to give my local community college some advice regarding some LMS migration decisions they have to make—if to migrate, when to migrate, how to migrate, and so on. In many ways, they’re a pretty typical school with some pretty typical problems, so I thought it might be worthwhile to write down some of this advice for others in similar situations. You might be one of those others if at least three of the following are true:
- You work at a small school of 3,500 students or less.
- You have a couple of dozen faculty “heroes” who are using the LMS heavily, a bunch more who just stick their syllabus in it, and a substantial number who don’t use it at all.
- You offer a small number of distance learning and/or blended courses, but you don’t have any online degree programs or similar systematic collections of online classes.
- Your school hasn’t migrated to a different LMS in a long, long time. Maybe ever.
- Your LMS is hosted because you don’t have the IT staff to manage it internally.
- Your “integration” between your Student Information System (SIS) and your LMS is to manually export CSV files from the SIS and upload them into the LMS.
- You have been on Blackboard CE since it was WebCT CE version 4 or earlier.
- You’re not sure if you can handle a migration to anything from either a staffing or a budgetary perspective.
If so, then this advice is for you: