Migrate University LMS

Our clients reached out to us after months of poor service from a discount LMS hosting company. They use a web-based LMS to teach courses and host seminars for about 700 students from around the country.

They needed a reliable and functional LMS to manage their roster, deliver content, and communicate with students. Unfortunately, their system regularly encountered errors embedding videos and sending messages.

In our initial analysis of their system, we determined that certain core functionalities of their current site were broken, and the LMS had not been maintained and updated on a consistent basis. Moreover, dozens of third-party plugins with broken and unmaintained code were bogging down their site.

Teaching had become a frustrating experience and the technology that should have facilitated their work was instead getting in their way.

Our recommendation was to develop a new Moodle LMS site and to perform a system migration of old course content into the new system.

We knew our clients needed a lot of information from the old system, such as participant information and course content, but not the bugs and outdated plugins. We set up a fresh, up-to-date Moodle installation on a new virtual private server. We were able to extract data from the old LMS site by writing SQL queries. We exported individual courses and migrated the content to the new Moodle LMS. Some broken features of the previous site had to be rebuilt manually in the new Moodle LMS, but the process of creating a fresh installation and migrating data without buggy plugins worked wonderfully.

We connected the website to a top-of-the-line email client vendor with excellent reliability and monitoring features so that we can spot and diagnose message deliverability problems.

Once the new website was up and running, we worked with the clients to fine-tune the site settings to their needs and coached them on best administrative practices.

We have been hosting the site and providing regular updates and maintenance ever since. We are firm believers in keeping to a consistent update schedule so that the website and LMS are healthy and secure. When we perform a system update, we test system functionality to see if the update has caused a conflict with any features. This crucial step is important to give our clients the best possible experience and to head-off potential problems. We also help our clients with operational support for their system.