How To Migrate Courses from Harmonia 2 to Harmonia 3
Harmonia3 is up and running! The beta release (3.0.18 or higher) is now publicly available from our website’s download page. With the beta release of Harmonia3 there are now several options to consider for your Fall Harmonia courses. Here is a summary of each option:
Option 1. Create new courses using Harmonia3
If you are starting a brand new course this Fall you will use Harmonia3. The quickest way to get a new course up and running is to take advantage of our free content library (fundamentals through chromatic harmony) which we have already converted to H3 format and is ready-to-go. Once you have added library content to your course you can download individual files in Harmonia3 and edit them as you see fit (see below). You can also create your own course materials from scratch by launching the Harmonia3 app and signing in with your teacher’s account to unlock all the app’s content creation and editing commands.
Option 2. Stick with Harmonia2 for Fall semester.
If you don't want to deal with course conversion/creation this Fall you can just stick with what is already working for you. In this case you will simply clone your current H2 course as your new Fall course instance, and then tell your students to download Harmonia 2.6.0 from our website. To make it simple for students we've added a new app download button on their personal dashboards that will automatically download the correct app version for your class. Note that if your student mistakenly installs H3 from our website for an H2 course the app will not connect to the course. The reverse is also true: if you have an H3 course your students cannot open its assignments using the H2 app.
Option 3. Migrate an existing H2 course to Harmonia3
Harmonia3 opens Harmonia2 files and converts them to H3 format when you resave them. If you have an existing course you can use this feature to convert your H2 assignment files into H3 format for your new course. If you class consists mostly of H2 content library files, you should start a new Harmonia3 course from scratch and add the content again because the new content has already been edited and tested. Otherwise you can choose one of the following two methods:
Method 1: Create the new H3 course instance, then access your old H2 course on our website and replace each H2 assignment with its H3 version using the following steps (see image):
1. On the website click the download button associated with the assignment file and save the downloaded file on your local computer. Then back on the website delete that assignment instance by clicking the “trash can” button in the upper right corner of its editor.
2. Back on your computer, open the downloaded file in Harmonia3. Edit the document content as appropriate, then make sure to save the file on your local hard drive - this will convert the file from H2 to H3 format.
3. On your computer navigate to the saved file, then drag-and-drop it back onto the assignment set editor on the website and configure the assignment as appropriate for your course.
If you have lots of files to process, send a message to help@illilacsoftware.com and ask us to zip all the files in the old course for you. When we give you that zip file, you will restore it on your local computer, then convert the files to H3 format and upload to the website using the steps outlined above.
Method 2. Send us an email and ask us "auto-migrate" your H2 course materials to a new H3 course instance. In this case we will run a script that will automatically convert your existing course files into H3 format and add them to your new course instance. Note that auto-migrating simply converts the files, it does not update them in any other way so you should still check each auto-migrated file and edit as needed. And if we auto-migrate material that you added from our H2 content library, you will still want to replace those files with their newer version in the current content library.
Streaming Audio in H3 Replaces Embedded Audio Replaced in H2
Harmonia3 does its best to honor H2 format when it converts H2 files into H3 format. There is only one incompatible change: if an H2 file contains embedded audio, the audio will be “stripped” from the file when it is saved in H3 format. In Harmonia3 all audio is streamed from the server, using the settings you have added to your personal media library. The media library is a new, free feature of your Teacher’s account on our website. We will explain the details of streaming audio and video in our blog post next week.
Testing Your H3 Course Material
Regardless of which migration method you use we highly recommend that you proof-read and test all your assignments before admitting students to your course. It is very easy to allows you test and edit your assignments in Harmonia3:
1. Launch Harmonia3 and Sign In with your teacher account.
2. Use the Content Browser to download and test each of your assignments. When Harmonia3 downloads an assignment it will automatically place you in “Student Role”. In this role you can complete the material and grade it just as if you were a student.
3. If you notice something that needs to be fixed, you can switch back to Teacher Role, edit the file and save it to your local drive. Then you will re-upload that document to your course
4. To test the file again in Harmonia, first sign out and sign in again to refresh the course data, then use the Content Browser to download and retake it in Student Role.
