How to switch teaching platforms without losing your materials

Changing platforms is rarely about the interface. It is about the materials: after a couple of years of teaching there are so many that "rebuild everything from scratch" closes the discussion before it starts. Here is what the move actually looks like — what happens on its own, what a person does for you, and where it is faster to ask than to guess.

What actually needs to move

It helps to start with a list rather than with a platform. The list is usually the same:

• Courses and coursebooks — the structure, the lessons, the order of topics
• The exercises inside them — quizzes, gap-fills, matching, audio and video
• Handouts that never lived on a platform: PDFs, slide decks, documents, scans
• Student progress — what is done, what is submitted, where everyone stopped
• The students themselves — they need an invitation to the new place

Each line closes in its own way, and almost none of them means copying anything by hand.

Step 1. Materials

This is the biggest part and also the fastest one. In langlisto the transfer starts right inside your account: the Materials tab → "Move materials". Pick the platform and paste the links to your own materials — the ones the platform gives you behind its "Share" button, one per line.

If you are on EdVibe or ProgressMe — the same platform under two names, which is why the transfer window offers them as one button — there is nothing else to do. Open a material on the old platform, hit "Share", copy the link and paste it here; several links at once are fine, one per line.

From there langlisto takes the material apart on its own: lessons and the exercises inside them are recognised by type and land in your library still editable, not as flat pictures. You can follow the run and its result in Settings → "Data transfer".

Step 2. When your platform is not on the list

The automatic transfer today covers EdVibe and ProgressMe. We also move materials from Vznaniya (Взнания) and other platforms — that one is done by a person on our team rather than by a button. The same window has a "Platform not listed?" link: tell us where you are moving from, add links or access, and we will look at the volume and give you the timing.

Step 3. Materials that live on no platform at all

For many teachers half the work sits outside any platform: PDF handouts, Word files, slide decks, scanned coursebook pages, a folder of images. Those move too — the files are turned into real lessons with real exercises, not an attachment a student downloads and fills in on paper. Start with a question to support here as well: show a couple of files and we will tell you what they will become.

Step 4. Student progress

We do move progress — and this is the case where writing to support beats hunting for a button: completed lessons, submitted work and their statuses belong to specific students, and moving them blindly is not something to improvise. Tell us whose history matters and it comes across together with the materials.

Step 5. Students

Students are invited by email: you enter the address, they get a letter with a sign-in link. No passwords to invent or pass around — the link drops them straight into their own account. If a student has no email at all (common with younger ones), support can set access up another way — also worth asking.

How long it takes, and no, you do not have to cut over at once

Materials from EdVibe or ProgressMe take minutes — send the links and go back to your day. Everything else depends on volume: support looks at what exactly needs moving and gives you the timing before the work starts.

Cutting over in one day is optional. The usual path is to move the materials, put one group or a couple of students on the new platform and run both for a while, until it is clear that everything is where it should be. The first 3 months are free with full access and no card, so there is room to check calmly.

Common questions about moving over

The short version: materials from EdVibe and ProgressMe you move yourself in minutes; everything else — Vznaniya, other platforms, PDF archives and student progress — goes through support, and that is the normal route rather than the fallback. Start with a single course: move it, look at how it reads from the inside, then decide about the rest.