Migrating 12,000 Students from Canvas to AWS Moodle with Zero Downtime.
How LMSOps extracted 450+ courses, converted QTI question banks, and engineered an autoscaling AWS architecture to reduce recurring LMS licensing costs by 58%.
1. The Challenge
The institution was managing over 12,000 active undergraduate and postgraduate students across 3 regional campuses. As student enrollment grew, annual Canvas SaaS license fees escalated past $160,000 per year. Furthermore, faculty required custom LTI integrations and specialized automated assessment workflows that were prohibited or locked behind closed proprietary APIs in Canvas.
2. The Migration Strategy
LMSOps deployed an automated migration pipeline designed to eliminate manual course rebuilding:
- Common Cartridge Extraction: Automated export of 450+ courses via Canvas REST API into IMS Common Cartridge (`.imscc`) archives.
- QTI 2.1 Question Bank Parsing: Conversion of over 3,200 complex quiz items (including formula questions and matching matrices) into native Moodle question categories.
- Historical Grade & Submission Preservation: Exported student grade histories, letter grade scales, and historical transcripts into a hardened PostgreSQL audit archive and synchronized current semester rosters.
3. High-Availability AWS Architecture
To guarantee zero slowdowns during peak term-time exam windows, LMSOps architected a resilient cloud cluster in the AWS London region:
4. The Results
The production cutover was executed over a single weekend with zero unscheduled downtime. In the following academic semester:
- Cost Efficiency: The university saved over $100,000 in Year 1 alone, eliminating per-student recurring license fees.
- Performance: Average page load time dropped from 1.8s to 240ms across all campuses.
- Zero Exam Outages: Handled 2,500 simultaneous quiz takers during finals week with CPU utilization peaking at only 34%.
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