Archive: Countdown to Canvas: Information for Instructors

The following message was emailed to current course instructors on 1/27/2023

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Dear Colleague,

Work continues on the project to replace ReggieNet, Illinois State’s long-time learning management system, with Canvas in time for the Fall 2023 semester.  As an instructor, you’ll have a critical role in the process and some important decisions to make, starting very soon.  This email is the first of a series of regular updates you can expect about the Canvas transition this spring.

Pilot Program

About 60 instructors and more than 2,000 students started using Canvas this month, as part of a pilot program. Already, participants have provided valuable feedback to support staff, which has informed some of the plans outlined in this message. This includes insights about the best ways to take old content out of ReggieNet and put it into Canvas.

Backup vs. Migration

ReggieNet will be placed in a “read-only” mode at the end of the summer term, and it will be gone completely by the end of the fall semester.  And unlike ReggieNet, Canvas won’t retain years and years of old courses.

So, it’s important to start thinking about how you wish to preserve your work currently in ReggieNet. You’ll have two options:

• Backup – this is the best option for most situations, and it can be done by you right now.  You can download documents, gradebook information, quizzes, and other types of files from your ReggieNet course sites and save them on your Illinois State OneDrive. You can later upload only what you need into Canvas’s centralized Files system and begin building out your Fall 2023 “course shells” at your leisure, once those become available. Visit the Center for Integrated Professional Development’s Canvas support hub to get started.

 

• Migration – this takes a whole ReggieNet course and converts its structure into a format usable by Canvas. This is a complicated solution best suited for courses that use a lot of tools or include a lot of assessments. Once the course is migrated, you may need to make additional changes to align the course content with how various tools work in Canvas. You will then import the data from the migrated course into your Fall 2023 course shell, much in the same way you populate new ReggieNet courses with previous ones.

Please note: Migration does NOT include student data.  If there are student assignments or grades you wish to keep for your records, you’ll need to backup those data yourself.

What’s Next

By the end of next week, support staff will begin taking migration requests for one version of each course taught from the spring of 2021 through the fall of 2022, including summer and winter courses. Instructors will have until February 13 to submit requests for this first round. After that time, support staff will work with the vendor to begin transferring data into Canvas.

Additional opportunities to request migrated courses, including those from earlier semesters, will be available later in the spring.

This process will be outlined in much more detail in the next update email, scheduled to be sent by February 3.

Access to Canvas

Instructors will be able to access both their migrated courses and their empty "course shells" for the Fall 2023 semester by the week of March 6. Professional development on setting up and teaching with Canvas, both in the form of self-paced, online lessons and traditional workshops, will be offered starting after spring break.

Summer Courses

Summer instructors will be given the option to teach using either ReggieNet or Canvas. They will be contacted in the next two weeks with more instructions.

Special Project and Ongoing Sites

Other non-course ReggieNet sites, often uses by committees, academic programs, and registered student organizations, are being identified. Owners of those sites will be contacted with guidance for moving those sites into Canvas. Watch for updates around mid-semester.

Questions?

The staff at the Center for Integrated Professional Development has been training to support instructors through this important transition.  If you need help getting started backing up your courses or wish to discuss options, email ProDev@ilstu.edu.

For a comprehensive timeline of the ReggieNet replacement project, please see the NextLMS website.