Dear Illinois colleagues, 

In the two months since the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign announced the adoption of Canvas as its campus-wide, unified Learning Management System (LMS), campus leadership, eLearning professionals, and the Canvas Advisory and Steering Committees have been working diligently on behind-the-scenes preparations. We are excited to update you on the new resources available on the Canvas Transition Website, what you can do now to prepare to migrate your course(s), and what’s next. 

Updates to the Canvas Transition Website include: 

• More in-depth information on the three different methods for migrating your courses—blank shell, manual migration, and automatic migration—and the pros and cons of each. 
• Training opportunities, including summer workshops; online video resources; a self-paced Canvas 101 Faculty Orientation course covering the basics; online, subscription-based workshops and training resources offered through Canvas; and more. 
• Charts comparing Blackboard to Canvas and Moodle to Canvas.
• A features chart highlighting some of the top features you can use now to assist you with your content delivery and classroom structure. 
• Instructions to Request a Canvas Development Space. 

Here are some things you can do now: 

• Visit the Training Calendar and sign up for a “Building Courses in Canvas” workshop this summer. If you can’t attend a workshop, you can view recordings of previous sessions, review self-paced documentation, or request a consultation.   
• Begin considering migration methods. If you want to get started now, you can use the blank shell or manual migration options. If you’re interested in automated migration, we recommend that you hang back and wait for more information, coming next month. 
• Request a Canvas Development Space to use as a sandbox or explore building your course now. 

Next month, we will provide information on: 

• Timeline and expectations for automatic migrations 
• Using templates 
• More useful features in Canvas 

Please remember that although Compass will be available until June 2022, we encourage you to begin using Canvas as early as possible to give yourself more time to adapt to the new learning platform. As a bonus, your students will spend less time juggling courses over multiple platforms. We also encourage you to subscribe to the Canvas mailing list to receive future updates about Canvas migration plans.

If you have any questions, please contact us. We want to help make your transition as smooth as possible! 

Sincerely, 
Canvas Steering Committee