LMS migrations are among the highest-stakes technology decisions an institution makes. They affect every instructor, every student, every course. Most institutions do them once a decade and have no internal expertise in managing the process.
The technical migration is actually the easy part — moving content between systems is well-understood. The hard part is change management, communication, training, and ensuring that the new platform is used better than the old one, not just differently. The hardest part is the politics: managing competing stakeholder expectations, navigating faculty resistance, and maintaining institutional confidence throughout a long, disruptive process.
What an engagement looks like
Migration readiness assessment
Before you commit to a timeline, I’ll assess your institution’s readiness — current LMS usage patterns, integration dependencies, training capacity, governance structures, and stakeholder concerns.
Delivered as a go/no-go assessment with a phased roadmap.
Migration strategy and change management planning
A comprehensive plan covering technical migration, content migration, faculty development, communication strategy, pilot design, and post-migration support. I work alongside your internal team, not instead of them — the goal is to build internal capacity, not create dependency.
Post-migration optimization
If you’ve already migrated but adoption is uneven or shallow, I can help assess what’s working, identify barriers, and design targeted interventions. Sometimes the problem is training. Sometimes it’s governance. Sometimes it’s that the migration replicated the old course designs in a new platform without rethinking anything. I’ll help you figure out which it is and what to do about it.
Why me
I led the University of Calgary’s migration from Blackboard to D2L Brightspace — a full enterprise migration serving 30,000+ users across all faculties. I know what goes wrong, what gets underestimated, and where the real risks live.
A few things I learned the hard way that I bring to every migration engagement:
- Content migration is a pedagogical opportunity, not just a logistics problem. The worst outcome is moving bad course designs into a better platform unchanged.
- Faculty champions matter more than training sessions. Peer influence drives adoption faster than any workshop.
- Governance has to be in place before the migration, not after. If you don’t know who owns the platform and who makes decisions about it, the migration will surface every deferred question at the worst possible time.
- The post-migration year is when the real work happens. Most institutions declare victory at go-live. That’s when the hard part starts.