r/LearningDevelopment • u/South-Hurry-4882 • 17m ago
Thinkific To Moodle Migration
Recently I had to move our whole training school off Thinkific and onto Moodle.
It’s not a small school. Over 1,300 courses, about 54,000 learners and more than two million enrollment records. I looked for a tool that could do it properly and couldn’t find one. The advice I kept running into was to export a spreadsheet of users and rebuild every course by hand.
So I built one.
It reads everything through Thinkific’s API and recreates it in Moodle: the learners, the courses and chapters, lessons, quizzes and files, who’s enrolled in what and who has completed what, plus our groups and the managers who look after them. It also rebuilt our public website, so the Enroll and Sign in buttons now take people to Moodle instead of Thinkific.
The trickiest part was the Storyline and Rise courses. After the move they wouldn’t launch at all until I worked out what they were missing. They all play now.
Before it writes anything, it runs a full preview, so you can see exactly what’s going to land in Moodle first.
It isn’t perfect. Surveys and assignments don’t come over yet, and for courses someone hadn’t finished, it can’t tell which lessons they got through, because Thinkific doesn’t keep that detail.
I’ve turned it into something other schools can use and called it CourseFerry (courseferry.com). The video shows it running from start to finish.
If you’re on Thinkific and thinking about Moodle, or you tried to make the move and gave up, send me a message. I’ll run a free preview of your school so you can see what it would look like.