Retiring itslearning VLE ... export/import help needed

[tomgrindle]

Hi Guys,

 

Hopefully somebody will know the answer.

 

It has come to the time where we have decided that the cost of our itslearning VLE is no longer justified. A lot of money to be spending on a glorified repository. Although this is a great decision, it now comes down to us to export and retrieve any course materials from the last 8 years that the teachers would like to keep.

 

We are currently exploring options of where we are going to store these materials once we have exported them. A few ideas are Moodle (internally hosted), Google Drive, or Shared Docs linked with our existing HAP installation for external access.

 

itslearning have been quite kind and allow you to export each course as a .zip, but in IMS format. Therefore the zip does not contain the file/folder structure of the course as shown on the VLE. Each document/resource is in its own seperate folder, but does contain a manifest.xml in the root. After validating the IMS online it would appear that these are fully compatible to import into Moodle if we wish. Although, there is a possibility that we may want to choose one of our other hosting options.

 

Therefore, does anybody know how easy/reliable it is to export out of Moodle. Does it export at all? In a friendly format? Retaining course structure?

 

Otherwise is there such a thing as an IMS converter that I can use to convert this exported .zip into a normal folder, using the same file structure as the existing course?

 

Thanks in advance

 

Hope you all have a lovely weekend

[nickjelly]

I looked at the same sort of issues when we migrated from Fronter to Moodle. The IMS export from Fronter was so proprietary that we gained nothing from importing it into Moodle.

 

It might be worthwhile setting up a moodle instance on a localhost and see for yourself what happens on the *import* of the itslearning file.