Case Study: RMIT Online Unit Migration: “A Lift and a Shift”

Case Study: RMIT Online Unit Migration: “A Lift and a Shift”

“Helping a university migrate and enhance hundreds of their academic units onto a new platform”

A project to help a university to enhance their units

The Challenge

RMIT needed to enhance hundreds of online academic learning units as part of their migration from Blackboard to Canvas, a task much more significant than their team could manage within the project time of 9 months.

Our Approach

RMIT engaged us to help with the unit enhancement and migration of hundreds of teaching units. One Liberate staff member initially set up the production process and advised on Ed Tech’s best practices. We then augmented the project team with experienced developers, increasing the size of the team every month to stay ahead of timelines.

We finalised the task in just three months, deploying 15 team members, demonstrating how fast and accurately we could work, and providing the pedagogical enhancements. We averaged 650 hours/week of effort, completing up to fifty 8-12-week units each week. We applied a level of instructional design to ensure the online teaching units were a fit-for-purpose, quality teaching and learning experience for students and staff. We further confirmed that all content worked seamlessly in the new Canvas platform.

Outcomes

The project name, “A Lift and a Shift”, reflects that we not only shifted the online teaching units from the Blackboard LMS to the Canvas LMS but also enhanced the content from a pedagogical and learning design point-of-view. Analysis showed that our proven migration method was approximately 20% more efficient than using an automatic export script to dump thousands of hours of content into the new platform. For RMIT, the outcomes were achieved much faster than they could have imagined, delivering highly regarded and enhanced online learning units for the university.