Scaffold Migration & Scaffold Archiving
Prince George's Community College easily migrates 2,000 courses and archives two years’ worth of data
Founded in 1958, Prince George’s Community College (PGCC) delivers superior, affordable education to the Washington, D.C., metro area with five full-service locations. PGCC serves ten to fifteen thousand students each year and offers a variety of associate’s and bachelor’s degrees plus certifications for trade programs. Student success is Prince George’s highest priority as the college seeks to enhance equitable access to higher education.
As PGCC’s contract with its learning management system (LMS), Blackboard, was coming to an end, the college began to re-evaluate what it needed in an LMS moving forward. Taking their unique student, staff, and faculty needs into account, the LMS migration committee opted for a move to Canvas.
To help make the transition as seamless as possible, Instructure recommended combining their service, Impact by Instructure, with K16 Solutions’ automated migration and data archiving solutions. In just two months, K16 Solutions easily migrated 2,000 courses and archived two years’ worth of data; then, Impact provided users with the just-in-time training and support they needed to navigate the new system.
Short-staffed Instructional Designers
PGCC was initially hesitant to begin an LMS migration project because the college was short-staffed on Instructional Designers who would typically lead this sort of project. The small but powerful team wouldn’t have time to re-create each course from scratch. Additionally, with 1,100 faculty to train and support, they wouldn’t have time to provide every faculty member individual training and support for one-off questions.
Faculty Fears
Faculty members were vocal in their concerns regarding moving data from one LMS to another. In some cases, they were concerned that traditional import options would not transfer over everything. In other cases, they were concerned the content would not transfer at all, resulting in hours of labor-intensive copy and paste work.
Archiving Costs
With ten to fifteen thousand students registered each year, PGCC had begun to amass hundreds of thousands of historical courses with student data. PGCC’s legacy LMS offered to make this data available for read-only access for a price, meaning Prince George would have to pay for two LMSs simultaneously. Maintaining a legacy LMS comes at a considerable cost; not to mention, if a student were to challenge a grade for a course that was stored in the legacy LMS, the college would not have immediate access to it. An IT person would have to find and restore the course for anyone to view that data, making the retrieval process lengthy and cumbersome.
"K16 made an LMS migration project not so scary."
- Nadine W. Edwards, Director of eLearning Services
With Prince George’s need for an efficient migration in mind, Instructure introduced PGCC to K16 Solutions. Scaffold Migration, K16’s automated migration solution, provided a clean transfer of 2,000 courses in just two months. When faculty logged onto the system for training over the summer, their courses were already set up.
“K16 made an LMS migration project not so scary,” says Nadine W. Edwards, Director of eLearning Services at Prince George. “They moved courses over intact, and staff didn’t have to build stuff from scratch.”
Once the migration was complete, Impact by Instructure provided a smooth transition for faculty by supporting users with targeted, in-line messaging to guide them through tasks. This step-by-step training, combined with Instructure’s 24/7 support, helped users learn to navigate the new system.
Additionally, PGCC implemented K16 Solutions’ Scaffold Archiving solution to archive two years’ worth of student data and course content so that it could eliminate the cost of keeping up its legacy LMS.
Cut Server Size by 70%
During COVID, faculty in many cases uploaded MP4 files directly in courses due to lack of knowledge about the media streaming solutions available to them, which caused PGCC’s server size to increase exponentially. K16 easily solved this problem during the migration process. “It was as simple as clicking a button and saying, ‘I do not want to transfer files of this type,’” says Edwards. “If you work with K16 and have certain file types you need to clean up, Scaffold Migration is the best!” Removing these erroneous files cut PGCC’s server size by 70%, providing substantial cost savings.
A Clean Break from the Legacy LMS
Archiving with K16 Solutions gave PGCC a clean break from its legacy LMS, which saved the university from paying for two LMSs simultaneously. Scaffold Archiving made it so that all data was integrated with Canvas and easy to access at any time. “This archive solution worked well because it moved student data over too. It provided us a way to still have our backup data and easily access it in case of grade challenges and assessment data,” says Edwards. “Technically, you only have 30 days for a grade challenge, so easy access is a must. You normally don’t think about these issues when you migrate, but it’s so important.”
Ease of Transition
Scaffold Migration by K16 and Impact by Instructure provided students and staff with a seamless transition. K16’s migration solution provided clean course transfer so that all faculty members had to do was log into their courses and provide minimal edits. Impact by Instructure streamlined training so that the new LMS was intuitive for users. Students logged onto their courses for the fall semester with all of their courses ready to go.
"I would have gone crazy if I didn’t have Impact and K16. Why make a transition hard when it could be so easy?"
- Nadine W. Edwards, Director of eLearning Services