Moving a course library is one challenge. Moving it while preserving the right access for several hundred students, each with a different payment history, is another.
For Irshad Centre for Hanafi Studies, the move to DeanDesk involved both. More than 2,000 course materials had to come together from Canvas exports, embedded Vimeo links, and content scattered across platforms. Students needed access to the courses they were entitled to. Some had already paid, some were partway through a subscription, and others still needed to complete payment before they could begin.
DeanDesk brought those pieces together: the public website, the learning platform, and the payment and access rules that connected each student to their studies. Irshad is now live, students have begun activating their accounts, and early feedback on the experience has been positive.
A website, an LMS, and a constant administrative handoff
Before DeanDesk, Irshad ran its public website on WordPress and hosted its learning management system on Canvas. Applications, payments, and course access did not form one connected process.
When an applicant was accepted, an administrator still had to set them up in the LMS and grant the appropriate course access. Keeping that access accurate required ongoing attention as students joined programmes, made payments, or needed an exception. The team was responsible for keeping separate systems in agreement.
The Canvas security incident made the need for a transition urgent. Instructure has documented the breach and service disruption. In the aftermath, Irshad could no longer continue delivering its services through its existing Canvas setup. In our migration work with the team, we encountered lost data and incomplete exports, leaving the available materials spread across several sources.
The task was to rebuild a working learning environment from those sources and give Irshad a more manageable way to run it.
Bringing a fragmented course library together
There was no single, complete source to import. Canvas ZIP exports contained part of the course library, while embedded Vimeo links and other materials needed to be brought across from elsewhere. Gaps in the available data made the migration more involved than transferring a set of files.
Across more than 2,000 course materials, the work required bringing content into DeanDesk and connecting it to the appropriate courses. Alongside that content, several hundred students needed their existing course entitlements carried forward.
Those two parts had to work together. A migrated lesson is only useful when the student who should be able to study it can actually open it. And granting everyone the same access would not reflect the different programmes and payment arrangements already in place.
Payment gates that respected each student's situation
Irshad's students were arriving with different financial histories. Some had already paid through another method. Some had paid for part of a subscription on the previous platform. Others still needed to complete the required payment process.
We used DeanDesk's form assignment tool to create payment gates for students with outstanding payment requirements. When those students activated their accounts, access to their course materials remained gated until they completed the required payment step.
Irshad's team could also bypass a gate for a student who had already paid through another method. That gave administrators a way to recognise existing payments and handle exceptions without abandoning the payment requirement for everyone else.
| Student's situation | How it was handled |
|---|---|
| Payment still required | An assigned payment gate held course access until the required payment step was completed. |
| Already paid through another method | The Irshad team could bypass the gate to recognise that payment. |
| Part of a payment plan already completed | The remaining plan could be shortened to account for payments made on the previous platform. |
Carrying partial payments forward
A student halfway through a payment plan needed a different arrangement from someone starting a new subscription.
DeanDesk's subscription management tools allowed us to override payment plans to reflect payments already completed elsewhere. We could shorten a student's remaining plan, carrying their prior progress into the new platform instead of asking them to start the full payment schedule again.
Together, these controls let Irshad enforce payment requirements while respecting the commitments students had already met. Course access, payment gates, and individual plan adjustments could all be managed within DeanDesk.
Using AI to make a complex migration practical
The volume of content was substantial, but the variety of student entitlements and payment arrangements added much of the complexity. Repeating every migration step manually would have meant extensive work across both the website and the learning environment.
We combined DeanDesk's payment and access controls with its MCP service, which connects AI tools to the platform. That allowed us to use AI to carry out much of the migration work, including recreating Irshad's public-facing website and bringing the course materials into DeanDesk, with limited human oversight.
The platform's configurable tools made that approach useful. The migration could accommodate existing payment arrangements and access requirements, including exceptions, while automation reduced the repetitive work of moving content and setting up the new environment.
Live, with students returning to their studies
Irshad is now live on DeanDesk. Students have begun activating their accounts, and early student feedback has been positive.
The result brings Irshad's public website, course library, payments, and access management together. Students who still need to pay have a defined step to complete. Students who paid elsewhere can have that recognised. Students with partially completed plans can continue with an adjusted schedule.
For Irshad, a difficult transition became an opportunity to resolve the administrative handoffs that had complicated its work long before the migration. Its team now has the tools to manage the different circumstances of its students in the same platform that delivers their learning.