Moodle at the ou moodle moot 2010

Moodle at the OU Ross Mackenzie The Open University

In the Beginning

Before Moodle
May 2005
Major review of OU learning and teaching systems

The Big Decision
6 th July 2005
“A momentous day for Britain”
“The most fantastic opportunity to do everything we ever dreamed of”

The Big Decision
6 th July 2005
“ A momentous day for Britain”
Tony Blair
“ The most fantastic opportunity to do everything we ever dreamed of”
Seb Coe

The Big Decision
6 th July 2005
Also the day when the OU decided we could go with Moodle
it did lots of what we needed
we could make it do what it didn’t
it would scale to our traffic levels

Initial Plans
Formal decision in November 2005
Initial (pilot scale) launch in May 2006
Full launch in February 2007
Follow-up release in February 2008
All developments would be released back to the Moodle community

Roadmap 1

OU - Moodle.org developments
OU funded/part-funded several major developments
Roles & Permissions (in 1.7)
Accessibility improvements (in 1.8)
Gradebook (in 1.9)
In each case we went live with beta releases

OU In-house Developments
ForumNG
OU Blog
OU Wiki
ResourcePage
Study calendar course format
Shared activities system
Newfeed
MyStuff
Dataplus
And more
Most available via Moodle contrib, others elsewhere

Quiz developments
Quiz Module development and maintenance
OpenMark
http:// www.open.ac.uk/openmarkexamples /
http://openmark.dev.java.net/

Other stuff…
Elluminate
Bridged link between Moodle and Elluminate
Content Authoring
Structured Content
XML-based authoring via Microsoft Word

Changes to Moodle 1.x
In addition to commissioned developments and local modules/blocks
In addition to changes to core
Localisations
2000 changes to standard Moodle
remade each time we sync with a new Moodle release

OU Development Model
Parallel Development Model
Quarterly releases – re-sync with stable Moodle release once/quarter
Three month development period / two month (two stage) test period ahead of each release

Requirements Gathering Development Functional Testing Pre-release Testing In Service

Craigellachie Fettercairn Knockando We Are Here

Local OU releases
Annual/six-monthly/fourth-monthly
Quarterly
limited changes between releases
regular requirements gathering
regular re-prioritisation

What have we learnt so far
Don’t go live with beta releases
Resist the temptation
Release early / release often
Annual cycles don’t cut it / Rolling releases hard to test
Your VLE is never finished
There’s always more to do

What have we learnt so far
Keep soliciting requirements
People will keep coming up with good ideas
Never underestimate the traffic
There’s always another bottle neck
Keep evangelising
Sell, sell and sell again

Where are we Now ?

Moodle at Scale
5330 sites on main VLE, 579 currently live
648,000 users in database, 168,000 currently active
In 24h period 35,000 - 50,000 unique users
Concurrency? – maybe 2,000 – 2,500

OU Moodle Architecture
Three layer architecture – Red Hat-based
5 webservers – 4 load-balanced serving users, 1 running cron
Database cluster – postgreSQL 8.3
NFS cluster
Storage Area Network

Webservers Database servers File servers Storage Area Network

Multiple Systems
Live Systems
Acceptance Test – near mirror of Live
Technical Testing system – replica of development
Development systems – one (or more) for each developer

People
Development Team
Support Team
Testing Team
Evangelists

Current Developments
Incremental Developments
Collaborative Tools (ForumNG, OUBlog)
Assessment (new quiz engine)
Structured Content (richer learning material)
Reporting systems
Working with Google Apps for Education
Associate Lecturer Dashboard

Where Next ?

Moodle 2

Moodle 2
Raises lots of questions
We’ve already working on elements of Moodle 2
Conditional Activities
Quiz Engine (maybe Moodle 2.1?)
We’re not making any decisions until beta, and (this time) not doing anything until there is a stable release

Moodle 2
We’re going to be working on migrating the modules we’ve developed (don’t yet know scale of problem)
We will be looking at the cost of remaking localisations
I’ve committed to understanding the costs of moving to Moodle 2 by end of June (beta permitting -  )

Moodle 2 options
Ignore it – stick with Moodle 1.9 – and do our own thing
Adopt it – remaking our localisations
Likely to be expensive
Adopt it – but accept many fewer localisations
Do more the Moodle way / Less the OU way

OU Learning and Teaching Systems Roadmap

Further out
Life in the Clouds
Already exploring Google Apps
Initial light integration (SSO)
Later tighter integration (groupings level)
Cloud Hosting – more likely using e.g. Amazon EC2/S3 than full external hosting….

OU at the MoodleMoot
Sam Marshall
Tim Hunt
Jason Platts
Anthony Forth
Phil Butcher
Tim Lowe

Any Questions?
Ross Mackenzie
[email_address]

http://www.moodlenews.com	318
http://www.slideshare.net	45
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	18
http://www.moodlemonthly.com	3
http://paper.li	1
http://moodlemonthly.com	1
http://www.earlham.edu	1

Moodle at the ou moodle moot 2010

by Ross Mackenzie on Apr 13, 2010

Accessibility

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

7 Embeds 387

Statistics

Moodle at the ou moodle moot 2010 — Presentation Transcript