Moodle Moot Uk 2010 – Afternoon Keynote


Afternoon keynote: Dr Ross Mackenzie, Strategic Development Manager, The Open University

Didn’t plan to use moodle at first. Changed on 6th July. Realised they were going with Moodle because it did lots of what they needed, they could make it do the things it didn’t do, it would scale to the levels they needed.

Shoddy track record using open source, used a lot but never contributed back. Decided the all Moodle developments would be released back to the community.

Funded moodle community on some basic needs OU had.

  • Roles & permissions (1.7)
  • Accessibility improvements (1.8)
  • Gradebook (1.9)

Some in house developments. Most available in moodle contrib.

OU Blog, OU Wiki, ForumNG, study Calendar course format, Newfeed, Mystuff, Dataplus, etc.

OpenMark (http://www.open.ac.uk/openmarkexamples, http://openmark.dev.java.net)

Elluminate integration, Content authoring (structured content, xml-based authoring via MS Word)

Lots of changes to core code. 2000 changes to moodle within the localisations.

Parallel development model. quarterly releases, resyncing with stable moodle once per quarter. Three month development period/two month test period ahead of each release to students.

Process: requirements gathering, development, functional testing, pre-release testing, & in service.

Try not to make changes between releases unless it is really critical.

VLE is never finished, development keeps on going.

General stats:

  • 5330 sites on main vle, 579 currently live(archives kept for 3 years in read-only mode)
  • 648,000 users in database. 168,000 currently active.
  • In 24h period 35k-50k unique users
  • Concurrency: 2k-2.5k

3 layer architecture. red hat linux. 5 webservers, 4 load balanced serving users, 1 running cron. Database cluster – postgresql 8.3, NFS cluster, storage area network. Bottleneck the SAN.

Multiple systems. Live systems, acceptance test (near mirror of live), technical testing system (replica od dev), development systems.

Teams: Dev team, support team, testing teamevangelism team.

Current developments: Working with google on google apps for education integration. Associate Lecturer dashboard (pulling stuff from different modules into 1 place).

Moodle2: working on conditional activities, quiz engine (perhaps for 2.1). Not making any decisions until beta release, and nothing substantive until stable release. Will migrate their mods and look at cost of migrating localisations.

Moodle 2 options: ignore it, adopt it and remake localisations, adopt it and not have as many localisations (do things more the Moodle way and less the OU way).

Life in the clouds: looking at google apps, maybe later some cloud (amazon? ec2/30) hosting for storage and/or computational load.

Will they get to a point where they have to decide between google tools and moodle tools within the VLE?


One response to “Moodle Moot Uk 2010 – Afternoon Keynote”

  1. Tweets that mention Learning Technologies » Blog Archive » Moodle Moot Uk 2010 – Afternoon Keynote — Topsy.com says:

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mick Norman. Mick Norman said: Blog by learn-tech: Moodle Moot Uk 2010 – Afternoon Keynote http://bit.ly/dg2iH3 #learntech […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *