Where's the A-Z? Driving Moodle forward... with roadmaps!
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Slides for section of workshop on Moodle Developments at RHUL for MoodleMoot UK Parmar N.R., Pope A., Jenner M. (2010) Where's the A-Z? Driving Moodle forward... with roadmaps! A key conference theme is how use of Moodle in Higher Education (HE) has moved from specialist, small scale examples led by a band of enthusiasts to institution wide solutions at the heart of the learning and teaching strategy. This, in turn, has posed several challenges for support staff in central services as they attempt to architect and manage Moodle as a robust, scaleable enterprise service whilst allowing users to innovate pedagogically. In this session, three institutions will share their approaches to Moodle development and management so far and discuss their future roadmaps, detailing internal and external expectations and influences. The session will encourage participants to add their key development themes, allowing for identification of potential areas for collaboration between and within institutions. MoodleMoot UK 2010 provides the presenters with an opportunity to look back at their institutions' progress with Moodle so far and reflect on the highlights of the journey travelled so far.
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Where's the A-Z? Driving Moodle forward... with roadmaps!
- 1. Where's the A-Z? Driving Moodle forward... with roadmaps! Moodle Moot UK 14 April 2010
- 2. Some Background http://www.flickr.com/photos/wfryer/2516648940/
- 3. 5522 Courses 19000 Users Avg 4000 Daily Visits 4 Instances 5th Term in Production 2nd Generation Infrastructure/ Architecture http://www.flickr.com/photos/wfryer/2516648940/
- 4. Course Management Policy ‘Internal guests’ RHUL Preview Role Student Record System Integration Course Architecture My Courses ‘X’ Server Library Blocks Wimba Live Classroom and Voicetools
- 5. Development Planning at RHUL http://www.flickr.com/photos/stansich/433484931/
- 6. Why?
- 7. Who? Projects and Programmes Board Governance Support & Development
- 8. Library Systems and E-Learning Scope and Relationships Federated Access Business Intelligence Research Management (RIS) Student System IAM Attendance Monitoring
- 9. When?
- 10. What? Backlog of Requests Scorecard Estimate High Level Release Plan Roadmap Document Currently in Excel Experimenting with Pivotal Tracker
- 11. How? Plan Approved Projects or Work Requests Submitted into IT Approval Processes Resource Planning and Project Management in Central Tool Annual Support Calendar Managed Separately
- 12. Themes Integration Infrastructure Identity Innovation http://www.flickr.com/photos/nathangibbs/270969697/
- 13. Roadmap 2010 Academic Rollover Infrastructure Review Styling Improvements Latest Brand Usability Enrolment and User Automatic Synchronisation To fully populate course lists Suspend/Delete old users Repository Integration Campus M Integration Improve Super Student Role Evaluate TelstarRefworks Reading List Module Single Sign On
- 14. On the Horizon Moodle 2.0 E-Portfolios Assessment Voice & Media Mobile http://www.flickr.com/photos/joleson/1215644931/
Editor's Notes
- As in going round in circles….
- Moodle at RHULWe actually support four Moodle instances. We also use Moodle as a Virtual Research environment and have two instances we host for specific academic projects. This presentation concerns our main virtual learning environment.We’ve been running Moodle since 2006 when it was implemented to replace Learnwise. We’ve integrated with Active Directory to populate users and Banner (Student Record System) to populate enrolments via a database view from the beginning (On login. We haven’t been able to get bulk synchronisation scripts working reliably enough).We moved to a second generation two tier infrastructure in the second term to host the web server and database server on separate machines. The moodledatafilestore is on a NAS connected via iSCSI.We have approx 5500 courses. These cover two years worth of academic courses (the current year and a locked down copy of the previous year), some academic support courses and some Royal Holloway International courses.We re-architected how we created and managed courses this term to help with system housekeeping and usability.
- Policy, Housekeeping and Developments So FarWe don’t have a large support and development team at RHUL so our developments have mainly been around specific usability or functional requirements or housekeeping and administration rather than any great innovations in technology or pedagogy We have to keep it real!!We have a policy of making as few changes to core code as possible and have limited scope to innovate new features ourselves.The areas we have invested most development effort in are in course management and housekeeping to hone our annual academic rollover. We archive courses within Moodle for one year after they have run and then remove them from the system. We create courses by uploading a file of courses from our student record system.To make it easier for users to navigate courses we have modified the Course List block to organise courses by category and add a coloured icon to represent different categories.We have created two custom blocks: a Library Resources block that provides dynamically created links to library resources relating to the course, and a search block that allows searches within library systems to be initiated from within Moodle.Our biggest customisation is the creation of an RHUL Preview role to allow any logged in user to view and also participate in courses that allow guests to a large extent. The only thing this role cannot do is submit assessed work. So within our institutional boundary our courses are quite widely open. However we still allow tutors to decide whether to close their course, even to ‘internal guests’ by turning off guest access. This essentially adds a new guest layer into Moodle’s role hierarchy and so we had to adjust several parts of the core code to break some of Moodle’s assumptions (like if you can view a course you are a course participant – moodle takes this from the capability not from a role assignment). This thankfully should be changing in Moodle 2.0 as this internal guest concept has caused us most problems and complicates upgrades.We also wrote what we call an ‘X’ service early on in the absence of anything providing what we wanted. This isn’t a full web service but is a small local script that allows us to run queries against the Moodle database with the result returned as XML. We currently mainly use this for providing users with a list of their enrolled courses in our portal – Campus Connect.
- How we approach development planning here…
- The various areas that drive requirements and push for developments. Probably pretty similar to everyone elses: they come from strategy, user feedback, issues/problems/ways we can improve our service delivery, or technology roadmaps.
- Brief organisational context at our place. During the implementation project we had a project board and steering group. When the project closed these boards dissolved leaving a governance gap. That governance gap was bridged by our Moodle Support and Development team who have essentially taken all decisions around Moodle development priorities for the last four years. It’s also been an issue to reconnect Moodle developments with the key stakeholders.Our Moodle virtual team consists of three learning technologists in Academic Development Services who provide all the training, advice and front line support to Moodle users. In IT Moodle is supported by a Business analyst, a Web Developer and a UNIX Systems Administrator. None of the IT staff are dedicated to Moodle.We have now resolved the governance issue through the formation of the Library Systems and E-Learning Project Board to oversee key developments across our e-learning, library and repository streams of work. This board includes IT, Library, Academic Development and Academic Department representatives. It connects to two User Advisory Groups to get end user feedback and feeds up to various other boards and committees. We still need to improve communication. On the formation of this board none of the representatives realised we hosted more than once instance of Moodle, were aware of the full range of modules and activities we had, or were area we had an institutional repository (to be fair this only soft launched in January and won’t fully launch until September). We have a course management policy and a 2010 Roadmap for Moodle but no real strategy for circulating these to end user and stakeholders or deciding where these should be published so there’s still some work to do here. With such a small team we spend most of our time just doing, without really stopping to publicise our work.We would be really interesting in talking to other institutions about how you get feedback from users and make and communicate development decisions as much as the content of your development plans.
- Again probably similar to others but we tend to work to a development cycle that aligns with the academic year so we concentrate on analysis, design and service delivery during term and major developments after exams during the summer.
- This is an overview of our process for deciding what enhancements we are going to do.I collect all enhancement requests and problems in a Moodle backlog. I scorecard and estimate them giving them a demand score and a delivery score to try and get a balanced priority. I also do a high level resource estimate. Having got some rough priorities we then group the work into releases staged throughout the development period taking into consideration our likely resource availability (because we don’t have a dedicated team we are competing against other claims on their time). The high level release plan is then written up into a more user friendly roadmap document for the year. Currently all this is done using an Excel spreadsheet. We’re experimenting with using our project management tool to capture these but it’s not so good at this high level estimating so we’re also experimenting with Pivotal Tracker which is a web based Agile planning tool.These documents now go to the Library and E-Learning Project board where they are merged into a consolidated roadmap and the proposed enhancements and priorities are compared against other workstreams. Once the consolidated roadmap is approved it then goes to the Programmes and Projects Board where we fight for resources against all the other areas needing work such as student systems, staff systems, facilities management, researhc management etc and then we find out which have been approved…
- Once we know what we will be working on for the year we generally just get on and do it using the standard kinds of project methodologies that you’d expect. We do the request management so they get a project or work request id, load them into the project management tool, schedule them, allocate resources, and cross our fingers they don’t run over time or budget!The only difference is annual support activity: those tasks we have to do every year. They have their own section of the project management tool and are always set up so we know how much resource is already taken by business as usual support work before we even begin managing the projects.All communications with end users and stakeholders is done through the learning technologists in Academic Development Services as the business owners of the system.
- What we are concentrating on this year….It’s not really a big development year for us this year. We changed significantly the way we structured courses last year and did a big course management tidy up and by the end of the summer we will be getting into the initial planning, analysis and design for the move to Moodle 2+ next summer. Additionally most of our developer resources are committed to other major projects this summer such as an upgrade to our student record system and implementation of a new Web CMS. So once again … not much scope for innovation … we will mainly focus on shoring up our infrastructure, improving how identities are managed in Moodle, and doing some integrations with other systems to try and provide a more joined up learning environment for our teachers and students.
- The biggest piece on our agenda is a redesign of our hosting infrastructure to improve service performance and reliability. The physical infrastructure we currently host on has reached end of life and has gradually been augmented over the years. We have problems with running out of space, data corruption, the dreaded mdl_log tables that have caused service outages this year. Also our various Moodle instances are all hosted on various different bits of infrastructure.So without making an application architecture changes we are going to design a new hosting environment on our virtual infrastructure and migrate all production and test instances to this new dedicated hosting environment. At the same time we will do some database tuning and health checks.We are also going to set up an Sandbox instance that uses our code base, but dummy data and can be opened up to other developers and users outside the Moodle Virtual team to try out new modules and have a play around. On the virtual infrastructure this instance can be easily reset and will hopefully encourage some more innovation without disrupting our test and production environments.The second big thing is to try and get the synchronisation scripts against Active Directory working. This will enable us to create all new users (at the moment Moodle profiles are only created or synchronised with Active Directory when that user logs in) and suspend the Moodle profiles for users who have left. Running the automated enrolment script will allow us to fully populate course lists which is a big requirements for academics who want to track academic activity. We haven’t been able to get this working against Active Directory so far whenever we’ve tried so we’re hoping a project to establish a new enterprise directory will help.Otherwise a few cosmetic adjustments to style, change the theme – our brand has moved on twice since we did this theme and will move on again with the Web CMS rollout. We’re also going to install the modules for our new institutional repository, Equella, that currently contains digitised exam papers and research outputs and will hopefully also include offprints scanned under the CLA HE digitisation licence by the end of the summer allowing us to provide access to these resources within courses in a fully legal way.We are rolling out CampusM which is a set of mobile based services built on web services that will include some information from Moodle.As we already use Refworks we’re going to look at the work the Open University has done as in their Telstar project to create modules to integrate reading list functionality into Moodle. Reading or Resource lists is an area that doesn’t seem to have a killer application/system for it and certainly at the moment most courses supply reading lists as Word documents or text files attachments within courses spaces which isn’t ideal. The integration of library systems with our e-learning environment is a big issue and priority for us here.
- Looking ahead Moodle 2+ is obviously the big thing. We will be looking to rebuild our Moodle service on Moodle 2.1 probably with a new architecture, improved infrastructure again, fuller repository integration. We will be pretty much starting from scratch rather than trying to upgrade what we already have.Additionally we’re being asked for improvements to assessment: anonymous marking, double marking, Turnitin integration etc. There hasn’t been much demand here previously for e-portfolios but our continuing professional development courses are likely to require these soon. We’re also looking to continue to provide voice tools and as media gets richer and larger looking at providing appropriate voice and media streaming capacity in place and align authoring and publication of these with Moodle.Whilst CampusM provides some Moodle information on mobile phones this will probably lead to demand to provide more Moodle functionality in a mobile friendly way and we’re interested in tracking the Moodle iPhone project and similar initiatives.