NC State currently relies on Moodle to serve its needs, but will open Canvas to full instructor usage in the Spring 2027 semester after a decision was reached from The University of North Carolina System Board of Governors in July 2025. 

Access to Moodle will end in the Spring 2028 semester. Digital Education and Learning Technology Applications (DELTA) is responsible for facilitating a smooth transition between the two learning management systems (LMS).

Donna Petherbridge, the Vice Provost for DELTA, said transparency is a focus of the operation as they begin their campus-wide transition. 

“We want to make sure that we’re open to talking to students and make sure that you all feel informed and listened to in this process,” Petherbridge said. 

This is not the first time NC State has transitioned from using one software integration to another. Recently, Panopto was adopted for recording classroom lectures, replacing Mediasite. Before that, video calls transitioned from Blackboard Collaborate to Zoom when the former was retired. 

“I’m very confident in my team,” Petherbridge said. “We have done multiple enterprise technology transitions over the years … so I’m confident that we’ll be able to do this well.” 

Stacy Gant, the Senior Director of Digital Learning at DELTA, does not expect this transition to impact the day-to-day experience of students and instructors because of the similarities between the two sites.

“The way that LMSs are set up are largely the same, so they have largely the same core feature set,” Gant said. “They push buttons in different orders, but your discussion forums, your assignments, your quizzes, your grade book … the way they operate are entirely consistent.” 

Gant said she expects students to handle the transition well, but recognizes that migrating courses from Moodle to Canvas might pose challenges for some faculty. 

“We expect our technologically fluent students to have no problems in transitioning. We expect that we’ll have to support faculty, especially in the content migration side of things,” Gant said.

Helping with this process, David Howard, the Senior Director of Academic Technology for DELTA, said there would be an ongoing research and development process consisting of two main phases until the full launch of the Canvas server to aid faculty. 

“There’s an early, what we’re calling evaluators, group and that is a group of people that are very knowledgeable with Moodle … they have to reach certain, you know, criteria, and qualifications to work with us. They’re not building courses for the future, they’re testing the environment and giving us feedback,” Howard said.

At some point, early adopters will be able to volunteer to use Canvas early and help gather more information, Howard said.

“Then we’re gonna move into this idea of early adopters. We still will have some requirements for that too,” Howard said. “We want people to have some familiarity with Canvas so they don’t go in with no understanding and require a lot of support … we are going to have an application process for that.”

There are currently countless third-party applications seamlessly integrated with Moodle that need to be transferred to Canvas or replaced. According to Gant, ensuring compatibility between Canvas and these applications is an early objective of the transition process and may be easy given Canvas’s large presence in the United States.

“What we’re going to be spending the next several months doing is essentially trying all of the various integrations that we have now,” Howard said. “Our hope is that canvas has a very large presence, especially in the United States, and so, you know, vendors that are creating integrations might start with them rather than with Moodle, which has a smaller footprint in the United States.” 

DELTA will work directly with product developers in the case of compatibility issues  — something they have effectively done in the past — or find alternative solutions, Howard said. 

“What we’ll have to do then is figure out, either can we work with those vendors to improve the integration? We’ve done that over the past year with Panopto and PlayPosit, where we worked with those two vendors and got them working together to improve their integration because we used both tools,” Howard said. “The other possibility is, absolutely, that we might end up having to go out and find something that is equivalent. I would rather not have to do that, just because that adds one more thing to the integration.”

Other UNC System universities are also currently undergoing this change, mandated by the Board of Governors. DELTA is also working with Canvas developers to help smooth the transition process and make the end product as good as it can be, Howard said.

“Canvas has a development team working on improving, essentially, the import of Moodle backups, Moodle courses … They have met with us a couple of times. They’ve almost met with folks at Appalachian State, another campus that is transitioning,” Howard said. “They will continue to keep us in the loop and meet with us regularly to make sure that the migration, the import, becomes as good as it can be.”