Necessary Reworking

Inevitably, when faculty first hear that we are changing to a new LMS, the response is not delight, but dread. One motivator for that dread is the certain knowledge that the things you had all nicely arranged will need to be reworked.  There is simply no way around it.  I am in the heart of that reworking now and, I'll be honest with you, its painful and annoying.

Stuff I'm reworking:

• Course Content - I leave content locked until we get to it. In ANGEL I did that by locking down folders. In Canvas, apparently I need to lock down individual items because locking down the module equivalent of the folders did not actually hide or prevent access to the content.  I'm popping regularly into the Student View to see what can be seen.
• Quiz Questions - In ANGEL, I used quiz banks for all my quizzes. So, I'd have a bank of 20 questions, for example, and only 10 questions would be on the quiz.  My actual quizzes had no questions in them, just a link to the quiz bank. Unfortunately, my ANGEL quiz banks came over as a single bank, all 620 questions.  I am going question by question through the massive bank and moving them into new banks. Incredibly painful.  In future, I would populate my quizzes in ANGEL first, delete the quiz banks and then move them over.
• ANGEL pages - the ANGEL pages (Add Content > Add Page) came over nicely. However, as far as I can tell, I can't edit them in Canvas.  I'm creating Canvas Pages and copying and pasting the HTML over from ANGEL. 

On the fun side, students are starting to be active in the class, accepting my course invitations,  completing the Pre Class Assignment and taking my pre-class survey, which I'll share with you next week, after it is complete.

I'm leaving for a 2 1/2 day meeting on Sunday, so between now and Sunday morning, I need to complete my course orientation and week 1.  I've got my work cut out for me.  I see some corner cutting in my future.

Also, I am inspired by this great video of Mr. Rodgers. Learning is good. New is good. I'm growing ideas in the garden of my mind. I plan to play this at the start of every Canvas training to get us in the right frame of mind. And when I'm feeling frustrated, I'll take a break and listen to it myself.