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Blackboard to Canvas Migration Report
Send the course export and get every quiz item sorted into transfers clean, arrives silently retyped, or has no target type at all.
River's migration report reads a course export and says what the move costs before you make it. Every quiz item is sorted three ways: it transfers as the same type, it arrives as a different type with a different scoring rule, or the target has no type that will accept it. You get a sheet with one row per item type carrying its count and its points, and a document naming what has to be rebuilt by hand. The counts are the whole point, because every guide to this is a list without one.
The finding that changes a migration plan is which route to take. Going out through Common Cartridge, which every guide treats as the portable option, loses more than a proprietary point-to-point importer does. The cartridge profile of QTI is cut down to six question types, and three of those six are optional for whatever platform receives them. So the report prices each route that is actually open to you rather than assuming the standard is the safe one, and on most courses it is not.
It is built for the instructional designer running a platform change across a department, and for the instructor with one course to move and one term to move it in. Use it before the export is generated, while the route is still a choice, and again after the import to find what the exception log never mentioned. Where a course arrived from a departing colleague rather than from a platform, read it back out of the artifacts instead.
Why the portable route is the lossy one
The Common Cartridge profile of QTI 1.2.1 permits six question types and no more: multiple choice with one answer, multiple choice with several, true or false, essay, a single-box fill in the blank, and a pattern match. Three of the six, multiple response and essay and pattern match, are marked an allowed exception, so a conforming platform may decline to implement them. The conformance guide is explicit that a platform is at liberty to ignore what it has not implemented. A valid cartridge can hand a valid platform an item it is entitled to drop.
Thornleigh State University moved BIOL 240 Human Anatomy and Physiology out of Blackboard Learn: 418 questions worth 705 points across 6 tests, one survey and 9 pools. Straight into Canvas's own Blackboard importer, 29 items have no target type at all, worth 51 points. Out through Common Cartridge, 86 items have no representation in the profile, worth 208 points, and another 89 land on one of the three optional types. The standard route puts 66% of the marks at risk against 30%.
Two more things decide what those 29 items really cost. Canvas Classic Quizzes keeps each one as a block a student cannot answer, so the quiz still declares 705 points and 51 of them are unreachable. New Quizzes deletes them, so the total falls to 654 and 29 questions are quietly gone. Separately, 43 short answer items arrive as essays, 26 of them on a deployed test, which moves 6,968 responses a term from machine marking onto a person.
How it works
Paste the contents
The quiz inventory out of the export, by question type, with counts and the points each one carries.
Name both ends
Which platform it is leaving, which one it is arriving at, and whether a cartridge sits in between.
Pick the quiz engine
Classic and New handle an unsupported item differently, so the answer changes the ledger that comes back.
Read the rebuild list
What has to be made by hand, ordered by whether a test somebody is about to sit depends on it.
What you get
- Every quiz item sorted into transfers clean, arrives retyped, or has no target type at all
- Each route priced on its own, because the standards-compliant one usually loses the most
- The point total the target quiz will declare against the points a student can actually reach
- Auto-marked items arriving hand-marked, counted in responses and hours rather than flagged as a warning
- Question pools counted against the banks the cartridge version permits, which is one before v1.3
- Per-response settings with no target field, which reach no crosswalk and no exception log
Common questions
Which route should I actually take?
Whichever one your item mix loses least on, which is usually the proprietary importer rather than the cartridge. On the worked course the direct route left 29 items with no target type and the cartridge route left 86 with no representation in the profile at all. The report gives you both numbers before you generate anything, because after that the choice is made.
What happens to my question pools?
It depends on the cartridge version, and nothing tells you which one you got. The v1.1 and v1.2 profiles allow one question bank in a cartridge, so 9 pools arrive as 1 holding 178 uncategorised reserve items. Version 1.3 lifted that to several. Rebuilding the structure afterwards is what the question bank pack is for, and publisher material adaptation maps a vendor bank to your outcomes.
Will the exception log not tell me all this?
It tells you about the items that failed, which are the cheap ones to find. It says nothing about an item that imported successfully as a different type, and that is the expensive category: a short answer arriving as an essay is a clean import and a permanent marking cost. Nor does it mention a partial credit setting that had nowhere to land.
Does this work for Moodle or Canvas exports?
Yes, and the route question matters more there. A Moodle backup is Moodle's own XML rather than QTI, so moving it means either a direct import or a cartridge export that hits the same six-type profile. A Canvas export is a cartridge already, so the profile binds on the way out whether you chose it or not. Name both ends and it prices each.
Classic Quizzes or New Quizzes?
They fail differently on the same file, so it is worth deciding rather than inheriting. Classic keeps an unsupported item as a block nobody can answer, and New Mexico's own guidance warns that the total will be inaccurate until it is addressed. New Quizzes removes the item instead, so the marks stay consistent and the question is gone without a trace.
What about the parts of the course that are not quizzes?
Release conditions, groups, gradebook weighting and rubrics travel worst of all, because no package format has a field for a rule. The report lists them as rebuild work with the setting named. Rubrics are quicker to rewrite than to reconstruct, which is what an anchored rubric is for. Caption tracks on the recorded media go the same way, and a course correction list makes republishing cheap.
Can it run the migration for me?
No. It plans one, and it is deliberately the step before anybody presses import. Afterwards, the items that survived are worth reading for the ones that were already broken, which is the item analysis, and the dates and policies get rebuilt against the institution's own syllabus rules. The migrated documents themselves are worth a pass through an accessibility checklist for course materials.
Blackboard to Canvas Migration Report
Fill in the form and your workspace opens with the work already underway.