tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67316011689078984362024-02-22T02:51:52.841+00:00Reflections on Learning OnlineRoss Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-23890525508555190072014-04-09T12:27:00.000+01:002014-04-09T12:27:42.041+01:00The Evolution of Learning Although I've been blogging enthusiastically about<a href="http://rossmac.blogspot.co.uk/"> photography and remote places</a> over the last year I've been somewhat remiss about keeping this blog current. In the year since I left the Open University I've had time to think about how I see e-learning evolving, and since I’ve just used the phrase it’s about time I came clean. I've never liked the terms e-learning or m-learning. I'm also no longer sure that I like terms like on-line learning or even distance learning either. It’s all just learning.<br />
<br />
The same argument applies to virtual learning environments and virtual communities, and I've had this discussion several times recently. There isn't anything virtual about the learning that’s done within a virtual learning environment, or anything virtual about the communities that an individual interacts with on-line rather than face-to-face. We should just be talking about learning environments and communities. The communities and learning environments that we interact with now are very real they just happen to be a bit different to the ones that we might have used in the past.<br />
<br />
The reality of evolution, and this works in almost any context, is that the bits that don’t work well should (and do eventually) get abandoned, and new things get tried. And just occasionally one or two of the new things do ultimately survive to sit alongside the things that have survived from the past. This simplistic model is fairly easy to picture in the steady state environment, but it’s more of a challenge when we start to think about a changing environment when more stresses are placed on existing things and there is a temptation to declare ‘everything broken’ and to throw it all away.<br />
<br />
The learning community has historically been split into two parts, one advocating changing nothing and the other advocating changing everything. A lot of my working life in education has been on the ‘changing everything’ end of the spectrum. I've always advocated trying new stuff and been keen to take risks to see how new stuff works in practice. Maybe this is best described as ‘Encouraged Evolution’. Very few teachers, and I’ll use this in the broadest sense, say that they are unwilling to improve on what they are doing, but there are many who I've heard say that they don’t have the time to experiment, and that the risks inherent in trying something different are too high.<br />
<br />
My intention is to use this blog over the next few months to talk about how I see Encouraged Evolution in the area of on-line learning.<br />
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<br />Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-62774969133709982492013-11-06T16:14:00.002+00:002013-11-06T16:23:48.940+00:00Moodle 2.5 Multimedia Cookbook by Silvina P Hillar<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhptv6rSDCaJrmw5xKmQIE_z8TZjlILWEufT0yXasdd-2C5L4G1HRkrUqsZA_344omzqT0c9k2_pLnatfKXXqaEKIfMRAVsswvXxf0xDFQEbfkisqE9PqcBBCANFOWekICGZInZPQzpQmep/s1600/M25MMCB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhptv6rSDCaJrmw5xKmQIE_z8TZjlILWEufT0yXasdd-2C5L4G1HRkrUqsZA_344omzqT0c9k2_pLnatfKXXqaEKIfMRAVsswvXxf0xDFQEbfkisqE9PqcBBCANFOWekICGZInZPQzpQmep/s320/M25MMCB.jpg" width="259" /></a></div>
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The subtitle on the cover says the book contains “75 recipes
to help you integrate different multimedia resources into your Moodle courses
to make them more interactive”. And that
is exactly what it does.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The author groups the recipes into nine broad themes. These cover user experience, maps, charts, interactive
documents, audio, video, images (of various sorts) and repositories. For each theme she walks the reader through a
number of external tools (mostly, but not all, freely available) that can be
used to create resources that can be integrated into a standard Moodle
site. Each tool is described in just
about enough detail to get you started, although I would expect the learning
curves to be pretty steep for some of the tools, if the reader is going to get
the most out of them.<o:p></o:p></div>
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As with a more conventional cookbook, the reader is likely
to skim through the book on first purchase and build up a mental picture of the
range of dishes suggested and when faced with a catering challenge (or in this case
a teaching one) to flick back through the book looking for the recipe that
comes closest to what is actually required.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The book does cover a huge number of different tools (at
least 75!), and this means that the examples must, to keep the book to a
reasonably length, be pretty simplistic. If we stretch the cookbook metaphor a bit further,
we’ve got a collection of basic recipes which the good cook (or teacher) will
extend by adding their own particular specialities. That said this book does cover everything
from starters through to desserts, with a few things that are only going to appeal to a limited audience.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The writing style is very chatty. I suspect that this will be fine for some
readers, but might grate for others. Once I got into the style it didn't
distract me from the content and the steps in any recipe (although I haven’t
yet tested them all) did seem to work.<o:p></o:p></div>
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My only real concern about the book is how long a shelf-life
it might have. It is tied to lots of specific version
numbers. The title makes it clear that
it’s intended to go with Moodle 2.5, but in addition a lot of the descriptions
(and the many screen shots) for the various external tools are inevitably
specific to the current versions at the time the author was writing. I suspect that some of these will already be
out of date. The ideas behind the
recipes will still hold true once the version numbers change, but the
step-by-step details might change.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In all, I think this is a useful addition to the bookshelf
(real or virtual) of anyone trying to go a bit beyond the tools that come
with standard Moodle. <o:p></o:p></div>
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My final word of guidance to these users would be not to try
and include too many of the recipes in any one course - variety may be the spice of life, but it is
possible to over-spice any dish you are cooking.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Note: Packt Publishing invited me to review this title, and provided an evaluation copy. The Moodle 2.5 Multimedia Cookbook is available from the <a href="http://www.packtpub.com/moodle-2-5-multimedia-cookbook/book">Packt website</a>.</div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-18508039466837564132013-03-25T13:15:00.000+00:002013-03-25T13:15:49.139+00:00March 2013 OU Learning Systems Update<br />
In this update I'll mention the recent update to the OU VLE, talk about the traffic levels we’re currently seeing and then mention the developments that we have underway for VLE releases in April and in June.<br />
<br />
First though, real time collaboration tools. Over the last few months I’ve made slightly cryptic references to replacing the Elluminate system that we’ve been using since 2008. I’m pleased to be able to confirm that we’ll be introducing OU Live over the next few months, based on Blackboard’s Collaborate Platform.<br />
<br />
We expect to have the first pilot use of OU Live in May this year, and to progressively roll that platform out as a replacement for Elluminate over the next 12 or 15 months. As with most major changes like this we’ll be making the transition gradually – migrating modules as presentations end. We’ve already started talking to a number of module teams about the transition process.<br />
<br />
The March VLE update happened as we planned on the morning of the 5th March. We refined our update process for this release so that we could try and minimise the interruption to services, and I think that refinement worked well, and we were able to bring the servers back up a little bit earlier than we had planned.<br />
<br />
Our next scheduled update is a minor one, planned for 16th April. This release is being put in place so that we can deploy the bridge software that links the VLE to the new OU Live service.<br />
<br />
We’ve seen VLE traffic drop off a little since our peak in early February. This mirrors the pattern we’ve seen every year, but we are still seeing well over 7M transactions each week, and typically forty to fifty thousand users visiting the system each day. Overall the system is performing very well, during this busiest period of the year, with the response times being well inside the targets we've set ourselves.<br />
<br />
We’re also in the midst of development activities for the June VLE update.<br />
<br />
We are expecting that update to be based on Moodle 2.4, and quite a lot of the development activity at the moment is being devoted to ensuring that all the OU developed components work correctly in the new version of Moodle.<br />
<br />
There is still some performance testing work that we will need to carry out on the Moodle 2.4-based system to confirm that it will be to handle to huge traffic load that the OU Community will place on the server. <br />
<br />
We expect the update to happen on Tuesday 4th June.<br />
<br />
And it will include….<br />
• Improvements to the Forum moderation tools<br />
• Enhancements to the OU Anywhere tools<br />
• An improved version of the OU Annotate system<br />
• Improvements to the Wolfson Open Science Lab platform<br />
• Improvements to the Quals on-line platform<br />
• The first release of a new ‘Moodle for Exams’ platform<br />
• An update to the OpenMark platform<br />
• And a raft of minor changes to a lot of the other tools within the VLE as we’ve updated them to work in Moodle 2.4<br />
<br />
And finally, this really is my final OU Learning Systems update. In the short term Geoff Aldridge will be taking over from me leading the Learning Systems team at the OU.<br />
<br />
I do want to say that I am really proud of the work that I and the Learning Systems team have done over the last six or seven years, providing a truly world class VLE to the OU Community. In the early days we struggled at times to cope with the growth in traffic, but we were able to find ways round those challenges. And we were also able to use the move from Moodle 1.9 to Moodle 2 to re-engineer the platform quite substantially so that we able to cope with traffic levels that we could only have guessed at – or dreamt of - a few years ago.<br />
<br />
I’m not going to single out particular members of the Learning Systems team for mention – the real strength of what we’ve been able to achieve has been down to the fact we’ve had a really strong team that brought different skills and perspectives to bear on the problems and challenges we’ve faced.<br />
<br />
And really, really finally thanks for reading these updates. I’ve appreciated the feedback I’ve received about them, and hope that they have been useful. I will be continuing to blog about online learning, but my comments are likely to become much less OU specific!<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-43025565580316351632013-03-24T10:30:00.000+00:002013-03-24T10:33:12.368+00:00A Memoire in Eight Bits<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Clearing out my desk drawer, in anticipation of escape, revealed a rich collection of old business cards, including lots of mine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A history of online learning in eight bits (of card)?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 1995</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First
arrived at the Open University – in the Academic Computing Service. Worked on THD204 built using Toolbook and
delivered on 3 CDs. First experience of
learning and teaching online at the OU was hearing from disgruntled users
demanding that we stay with CoSy rather than move to that new-fangled
FirstClass system.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 1999</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After
a brief escape, returned to the OU to join the Library. Helped them through the trauma of Y2K, made
all their servers run the same operating system, and helped with the
implementation of the Voyager library management system.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 2000</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jumped
to the newly-formed LTS and to On-Line Applications Team. We built course websites. Lots of them. We worked with individual course teams and
then handcrafted websites to do exactly what they needed. Great fun, but very expensive and with lots
of maintenance work to do each year. ColdFusion was our friend, and
occasionally our foe. Online stuff was,
for most course teams, an optional extra or afterthought to the course, but we
did make the revolutionary (or at least evolutionary) step of moving to
load-balanced servers.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 2002</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I must
have been important by this stage – was allowed a yellow blob on my business
cards. Media Account Manager for OU
Business School, for IET and ran the Corporate Team in LTS. Lots of time taken up getting the OU's home-made lightweight Learning Management system up and running, and persuading
course teams that they should move from their lovingly crafted website to that
new-fangled Promises system.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 2005</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Start
of the Moodle years. Clearly a time of
radical thinking – we even had trendy ‘portrait’ business cards. Made the decision to move away from lots of
different systems and technologies, and hand-crafted websites to a single
platform that would do (almost) everything we needed. And in
our spare time we built OpenLearn (building on the work we were already doing
to make Moodle work at the scale that the OU needed). Lots of grumbles from disgruntled users that
we should stay with FirstClass rather then move to that new-fangled Moodle
system. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 2007</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Everything
gets bigger, including the type-face – business cards go back to ‘landscape’, and the FAX number now
disappears from the card. Every course
now needs to have a course website, and online is no longer just an optional
extra. Senior management now get
agitated whenever there’s a problem with the VLE. Not that there were too many
problems.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 2010</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Moodle
2 on the horizon. We make the decision that we will move to Moodle 2, and move
away from the huge number of core customisations that we’d introduced while
using Moodle 1. Traffic levels still
rising as more and more courses now make more and more use of more and more
features within the VLE. I’m sure we did
have grumbles from disgruntled users that we should stay with Moodle 1.9 rather
then move to that new-fangled Moodle 2 system.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi326-h0EhL-XHhwbV6hkpgEKxgtMZkzW3QYkN_9KX1fxFJWTutcEX8dAorM5y2qJkv75vAmxGGLf2yFmGrwSZ_7dPX-LcXceywuKhwmjRF4rEwA-hkL3fghIV3BiAWxq5GlebxS69aU9iU/s1600/2012-001_edited-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="clear: left; float: left; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi326-h0EhL-XHhwbV6hkpgEKxgtMZkzW3QYkN_9KX1fxFJWTutcEX8dAorM5y2qJkv75vAmxGGLf2yFmGrwSZ_7dPX-LcXceywuKhwmjRF4rEwA-hkL3fghIV3BiAWxq5GlebxS69aU9iU/s320/2012-001_edited-1.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2012</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Moodle
2 up and running and being used for the OU’s main VLE, for OpenLearn and for
Qualifications OnLine. Regularly seeing
days with well over 1M transactions. Regularly
seeing days with over 60,000 unique users using the system.</span></span></div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-60536797886111745852013-03-17T19:34:00.000+00:002013-03-18T12:04:18.515+00:00Head of IT Development (Learning Systems), The Open University<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvl-I9bmLltMeh25U5nAxMHY6xUcpScNBBIQvNjMG3fpGkokmB8C4AdTNwrZxkqcpQ0iNxpvTFxIt8hpuGk3F0pPZ5G2XrhkQ2ZNT3ze2yt2f0rpc-TuigupayJjhnQaPp6MGAD2hnKQKZ/s1600/DSC_1244.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvl-I9bmLltMeh25U5nAxMHY6xUcpScNBBIQvNjMG3fpGkokmB8C4AdTNwrZxkqcpQ0iNxpvTFxIt8hpuGk3F0pPZ5G2XrhkQ2ZNT3ze2yt2f0rpc-TuigupayJjhnQaPp6MGAD2hnKQKZ/s320/DSC_1244.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
I guess I really must be <a href="http://rossmac.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/plan-b.html">leaving</a>.<br />
<br />
The recruitment to find my replacement at the Open University is now under-way. It really is a slightly strange experience seeing my job being advertised. I can't recall a previous instance where I was being directly replaced, although I don't know if this says more about me or about the other jobs and roles I've had.<br />
<br />
The advert is on the <a href="http://www3.open.ac.uk/employment/job-details.asp?id=6834&ref=ext">university jobs website</a> - go on, have a look - the closing date is 28th March 2013.<br />
<br />
The role does undoubtedly have challenges. You get to juggle lots of different systems, that are now used (and relied on) by a huge number of students and teachers both across the UK, and further afield. The posts elsewhere on this blog will give you an idea of the scale of operation, and how it's grown over the last few years. But the role does also come with a few outstanding perks - and I don't mean the attractions of living in Milton Keynes. A lure that I've managed to resist.<br />
<br />
The annual leave allocation is pretty good - as my <a href="http://rossmac.blogspot.co.uk/">travel blog</a> over the last few years might suggest<br />
<br />
But rather more seriously - the most obvious perk is the fantastic learning systems team you get to work with. These people appear collectively to be able to make Moodle do pretty much anything. They've certainly been able to make Moodle do anything that the institution has asked of it over the last seven years, and what's more to make it work at amazingly large traffic volumes.<br />
<br />
Another real perk is the scarily imaginative academic users around the institution. Within a big institution like The Open University there are a lot of very bright and very committed people - and they do come up with some very interesting ideas. One of the fun things in the role has been working with these teachers and with the other folks in my teams to figure out how to deliver what they want to do. Sometimes figuring out how to say <a href="http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2013/03/goodbye-to-two-colleagues.html">Yes </a>has been a challenge, but a good challenge.<br />
<br />
If you want to know more about the job - either go to the <a href="http://www3.open.ac.uk/employment/job-details.asp?id=6834&ref=ext">OU jobs website</a> or get in touch with me directly.<br />
<br />
By the way, you need to bring your own boots - I'm taking these ones with me.Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-33571983422596220512013-02-20T14:40:00.002+00:002013-02-20T14:56:12.791+00:00Learning Systems Update - February 2013<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 200%;">Since the
last update in <a href="http://reflectionsonlearningonline.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/december-2012-learning-systems-update.html">December</a>, the Open University Learning Systems team has relocated from the Learning and Teaching Systems Unit to the IT Department,
we've completed the development work for the March VLE update, we've started
work on developing the bridge software linking the VLE with the Elluminate
replacement and we've seen our busiest ever day on the OU VLE.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">First
traffic, on Monday 4<sup>th</sup> Feb – we recorded almost 1.7M transactions from over 67,000 unique users over that 24 hours. We also took the opportunity to try and
make some meaningful estimates about the number of students we see online at
the same time. This peaked, mid-evening, at over 5000 simultaneous
users.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The next VLE release is currently in pre-release testing, and the upgrade is expected to
happen early on Tuesday 5<sup>th</sup> March 2013.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In this release we’ll be <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">• Moving to Moodle 2.3.3 as underlying
platform<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">• Introducing a redesigned version of
the OU blog, to improve consistency with other collaborative tools within the VLE<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">• Making changes to our XML-based Structured Content authoring system –
enabling video download in addition to online view, and reducing
our support for Microsoft Word as we continue the move from Word to Oxygen as the OU's main XML authoring environment<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">• Introducing a Statement of
Participation, which will be used for Non-Accrediting Learning<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">• Making improvements to wide range of
module administrative tools <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">• Releasing the first version of the Wolfson
Open Science Laboratory platform<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">As always,
there will be a full set of release notes made available, to the OU community, around the time that
the update goes live.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We’re also
working towards a limited update to the VLE in April to introduce a new bridge
to support pilot use of the OU’s replacement for Elluminate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Towards the
end of April there will also be a fairly major update to the OpenLearn platform
– within the Moodle part of the platform the biggest changes will be support for badges and also a number of collection management tools.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">At the
moment the team are mainly working on the developments that are expected to appear in the June VLE update –
which will, assuming we don’t uncover any performance issues, be based on
Moodle 2.4.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And finally, as regular readers will know, I’ve recently<a href="http://reflectionsonlearningonline.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/plan-b.html"> made the decision</a> to hand over the reins of the Learning Systems
team, and I’ll be leaving the Open University at the end of March. I’m expecting the advert for my replacement
to appear on the OU jobs website real
soon – do get in touch with me if you want to know more.</span></div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-82979163270869020742013-02-03T16:18:00.000+00:002013-02-03T16:18:59.272+00:00Plan B<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Just occasionally I feel the need to write a post that will
wind up on both my travel and photography blog and also on my e-learning blog.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The last time I did this was in September
2011 when I was about to temporarily hang up my e-learning shoes to go and
spend a bit more time carrying a camera out in the wilds.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">After spending most of the last 17 years around the Open
University, and the last 7 years leading the Learning Systems team at the OU, I
have decided that now is time to make some changes.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I’m going to be leaving the OU at the end of March, to look
for interesting new things do. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">A number of people already know that I’m going to leave, and
the most common question I’ve been asked is “What are you going to do?”. My
stock answer is that “I’ve got lots of ideas, but no firm plans”.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I’m certainly intending to try and achieve a better work-life
balance, or perhaps more critically a better desk-wilderness balance. During my six months away I was able to spend
a lot of time outdoors – mostly in cold, bleak places – and I do want to find
ways of continuing to do that for rather more of the year than is possible even
with the generous annual leave allocation I’ve been getting at the OU.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I do still want to be involved in using web technologies to transform
education. I’ve been fortunate in being
able to contribute to a large number of interesting educational technology projects
over the last ten years and I’m keen to continue to make use of that
experience.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ve also talked with lots of people about travel and
photography in the far North and the far South, and I’m keen to continue to do
that. I also want to help people make
better use of the cameras they’re carrying and to add to my own photographic
portfolio.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">So, if I you think I might be able help you do e-learning or
educational technology projects better, do get in touch. Or if you want to hear more about some of the
places I’ve been to or think I can contribute to projects in cold and/or remote
places, get in touch. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Anything interesting considered. Well, as long as it’s legal.</span></div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-12947815412315121402012-12-15T12:26:00.000+00:002013-02-03T12:29:14.369+00:00December 2012 Learning Systems Update<span style="font-family: inherit;">[Have just realised that I didn't publish this when I wrote it - I can only blame the excessively large number of pre-Christmas lunches I indulged in during December].</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Welcome to the final Learning
Systems Update of 2012.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We’ve just rounded off a very busy and productive year for the
learning systems team by releasing a major VLE update.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">A major part of the update was moving the system underlying the
VLE from Moodle 2.2 to Moodle 2.3 – giving us a lot of new functionality
associated with the newer version of Moodle.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We’re also adding in a lot of new local OU features – some of
which I’ve been promising for several months.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There are quite a number of improvements related to quizzes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We’ve added a long awaited feature that sends a reminder email to
students who have attempted a summative quiz but haven’t remembered to submit it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We’ve added a number of new administrative features to the quiz,
and we finally get STACK questions as part of the Moodle quiz. This will dramatically improve our ability to
both assess and teach mathematics online.
We’ve already done quite a lot of
publicity around this, but if you want to know more or see a demonstration
contact me, or Phil Butcher or Tim Hunt.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Our structured content tools get a number of improvements too<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We can now produce ePub3 interactive eBooks – so we can better
support learners with iPads, we’ve improved our support for videos, and we have
also improved our systems so that we can handle very big files more
efficiently.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There are also the VLE enhancements that we need to allow users of
the soon-to-be released OU Anywhere apps to get their course materials.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">As always there are release notes on the Online Services website
that will give you chapter and verse on both the new features and existing
features in the VLE.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Availability and performance levels for the VLE continue to be
good for the both the old and new VLE platforms, and we are seeing approximately
5M transactions each week almost all on the new VLE and something like
40-50,000 unique users visiting us in any 24 hour period.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">As we move into the New Year there will some big changes for the
learning system team.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We’ll be completing our development work for the March VLE update,
and we’ll also be starting to do some of our preliminary testing of Moodle 2.4,
in anticipation of moving to that as part of the June update.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In addition, In January I and the learning systems team will be
moving from Learning and Teaching Solutions to join the IT Development team. This will ultimately mean quite a lot of
changes to the way we work. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">However, while I hope in the short term the change won’t be
apparent to any of our users, it will, in the longer term, enable us to both develop
and support our systems even more effectively than we do at the moment.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-28885529328278582792012-11-08T12:31:00.000+00:002012-11-08T12:31:24.498+00:00November 2012 Learning Systems Update<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">We’ve now passed our code freeze date for our next VLE update, and we are in our "testing
and bug fixing" phase ahead of the code deployment on Tuesday 4<sup>th</sup>
December. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Since
my last post we've made the decision to use Moodle 2.3 for the
December release. We completed a load
testing programme in mid-October, and we’re now confident that the system will
be able to carry the load we’re currently seeing – and have quite a lot of
headroom too to cope with further growth.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The
December update is going to be a fairly major one for the platform taking us
from Moodle 2.2 to 2.3 in addition to adding new features, and we’ll be warning users that they should
expect the system to be out of service for up to 2 hours early on 4<sup>th</sup> December. There will be notices on both <a href="http://www.open.ac.uk/students/">StudentHome </a>and
<a href="http://www.open.ac.uk/tutorhome/">TutorHome</a>, warning users that the system is going to be unavailable once we've confirmed the timing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">As
we’ve gone into testing, we’ve also been able to start to firm up the catalog of
features we expect to include the December release. As always this list comes with the caveat that if a major problem appears during testing we might need to hold back a
feature to the March update.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">As
I mentioned <a href="http://reflectionsonlearningonline.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/october-2012-learning-systems-update.html">last month</a> the December release will include STACK, our new tool
for assessing and teaching mathematics, changes to OU Annotate and the
introduction of a new content handling mechanism to support the new suite of
apps that are being developed for the <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/07/distance-learning-university-the-open-university-repackages-course-materials-for-the-app-generation/">OU Anywhere</a> project. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In
addition we’re also adding tools that allow interactive ebooks (in epub3
format) to be produced automatically.
We’ve also finally had a chance to migrate the Repository activity from
Moodle 1.9 to run in Moodle 2.3.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">As
we finalise the release features we’ll be putting together a set of release
notes which will appear on the <a href="http://learn3.open.ac.uk/mod/subpage/view.php?id=9679">Online Learning Systems website</a>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">As
expected at this time of year, we are seeing plenty of students making use of
the VLE. Over the last few weeks we’ve
seen an average of just over 41,000 unique students visit the main VLE each day, and the total traffic on the system averaging just over 800,000 transactions daily. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">As
usual we are again seeing our ‘normal’ fluctuation in traffic over the course
of the week – with our peak traffic (typically 50,000 unique users,
generating over 1,000,000 transactions) on Mondays, which gradually drops off
to our ‘quiet’ day on Saturday, before picking up again on Sunday to another
peak on the following Monday.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The
final topic I want to mention, is to give you an update on how the Learning
Systems team are continuing to work with the wider Moodle community. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">At
the end of October two members of the Learning Systems team attended the <a href="http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Perth_Hackfest_October_2012">Moodle DeveloperConference</a> in Perth in Western Australia<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">This
event addressed a lot of the challenges facing both us and other large-scale Moodle users.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I’m
hopefully that in the short term, changes to the way that Moodle uses caches
will improve our performance once we get to Moodle 2.4 (hopefully in mid 2013). And that some of the other suggestions and
ideas will make a significant difference to both features we use and to overall performance with
later versions of Moodle.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-3269257526695014562012-11-06T13:33:00.002+00:002012-11-06T14:15:30.642+00:00New and OldWelcome. I've decided to move my work blog from it's location on the Open University VLE to a new home here.<br />
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The old site will remain live but I'm not planning to make any further updates there. I've moved the old posts going back to late 2009 over onto this site, and further updates will appear here.<br />
<br />
And if the URL here is just too long to remember - try <a href="http://tinyurl.com/rossmac">tinyurl.com/rossmac</a><br />
<br />Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-34384374155617704822012-10-11T19:38:00.000+01:002012-11-06T12:14:00.859+00:00October 2012 Learning Systems update<br />
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I think it's safe to say that our autumn traffic surge has well and truly started. Over the last few weeks our total transaction count on the various systems within the VLE collection has climbed from under 4 million to 5 million to then to well over 7 million. We’re also finally seeing our new Moodle 2 system really start to the take over from the old Moodle 1.9 system – recently the new system has been carrying well over 75 % of the traffic, and we recently saw the newer system finally have it’s first 1 million transaction day. I’m pleased to say that the platform is continuing to perform well under this high load.<br />
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As I mentioned in the last update there isn’t a VLE update in either October or November, however we do have a lot of development activities underway targeted at the December release. I’ll talk about a few of these.</div>
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We’ve just about completed work on the STACK development to support assessment of mathematics – this work has been a partnership between the OU and University of Birmingham, and I’m delighted that the system is finally getting it's first use in Birmingham this month, and on OU systems shortly after that. To find out more, go and join in the animated discussions on the <a href="https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=197507" style="color: #003366;">moodle.org forums</a>. There is also due to be a book published shortly by Chris Sangwin (our collaborator at Birmingham) which will say much more about computer aided assessment in mathematics.</div>
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We’ve also been doing development work to improve the way that Moodle handles the growing number of very big files we have. Moodle isn’t really designed to handle big files well, and as more projects and initiatives around the OU have started to produce huge video files or complex ebooks we’ve needed to find way to both store and deliver these to users. A new development, that will be part of the December release, will make this process much more efficient. If everything goes well users won’t notice any change – but the overall system performance should get better. There is more about this on <a href="http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=123877" style="color: #003366;">Sam Marshall's blog</a>.</div>
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On the theme of system performance, we’ve been continuing to evaluate the performance of Moodle 2.3. We’re currently running with Moodle 2.2 and we want to be sure that moving to version 2.3 won’t have an adverse impact on performance.</div>
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We’ve also started doing a further round of development work on the Annotate system. We’ve given this system a little while to bed down, and we now have a series of new features we want to add to the system. These will appear progressively over the next few releases – starting with the December release. There is a some background information on Annotate on <a href="http://ltsdevmusings.wordpress.com/tag/ouannotate/" style="color: #003366;">Jenny Gray's blog</a>, and if you are a member of the OU community you can get more information and try it out at <a href="http://students.open.ac.uk/annotate" style="color: #003366;">http://students.open.ac.uk/annotate</a></div>
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Finally I want to talk about Elluminate. We had an interruption to the Elluminate service during the last weekend of September, which impacted a significant number of users. There were two issues linked to the problem, the first (which we are still exploring with Blackboard) related to a problem with the underlying database which supports part of the Elluminate system, and a second issue which is related a slightly strange state that the system got itself into when it was restarted. We’ve already put a fix in place for this second issue, so that if similar problem recurs with the database we should be able to resolve it much more rapidly.</div>
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While I’m talking about Elluminate I should say that we are still working with a number of external suppliers to identify what will replace the current Elluminate platform next year – hopefully I’ll be able to bring you the outcome of that deliberation as part of the November update.</div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-69576727120259517402012-09-05T19:37:00.000+01:002012-11-04T19:41:48.037+00:00September 2012 Learning Systems update<br />
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Since the last update, we’ve had two successful VLE releases, and continued the procurement process to find the replacement for our current real time collaboration system.</div>
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Over the two VLE releases we’ve added new features to ForumNG, updated the MyReferences toolset and made a number of changes to the HTML editor including improvements to its handling of TeX and MathML code and its tools for rendering tables. In addition we’ve also made a significant number of improvements to the <a href="http://learn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=5195&m=3" style="color: #003366;">Structured Content tools</a> within the VLE. (Apology: The links within this post are only going to be reachable by members of the OU community)</div>
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In the August release we also started the pilot deployment of the new Participation Tracking report which will help the new Curriculum Support teams to identify individual users who are struggling with their studies, and who may need additional support.</div>
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There are full details of all these changes in the release notes which you can find on <a href="http://learn3.open.ac.uk/mod/subpage/view.php?id=9679" style="color: #003366;">releases page</a> of the online learning systems guide website.</div>
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We’ve also updated the <a href="http://learn3.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=300018" style="color: #003366;">guidance notes</a>, the <a href="http://learn1.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=100001" style="color: #003366;">computing guide</a> and the <a href="http://learn3.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=20435" style="color: #003366;">style guide</a> to reflect recent changes to the VLE toolset.</div>
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As we might expect, the traffic levels on the VLE have been relatively low over the summer (about 3.5M transactions each week compared with the peak of almost 9M we saw earlier in the year) – but we're expecting the traffic levels to start picking up quite dramatically over the next few weeks.</div>
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In additon to the releases there have also been a number of back end developments carried out within the learning system team. We’ve been carrying out the preparatory work to allow us to switch the VLE over to running under the more secure HTTPS protocol – this shouldn’t make any difference to the learning experience of the users, but will enable us to have greater confidence that VLE traffic is fully protected.</div>
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Alongside that work, we’ve been evaluating Moodle 2.3. At this point we are still running Moodle 2.2 on the OU VLE, but I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to complete the load testing to give Moodle 2.3 the go ahead over the next few weeks so that we can use this for our December release.</div>
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On the topic of releases. Over the last nine months we’ve been carrying out monthly VLE releases. We are now going to swap back to our quarterly pattern, so our next planned release of the VLE will be in early December.</div>
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The September update was also an important release for the Quals On Line platform which is due to go live to students during the second week of September.</div>
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The procurement exercise to replace Elluminate has continued over the summer. We are currently in discussion with a number of potential providers, and we expect to come to a conclusion at some point in November.</div>
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The final topic I want to mention in this update relates to Learning Systems team rather than to the Learning systems platforms.</div>
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As some of you will no doubt have seen from the <a href="http://intranet.open.ac.uk/ouintra/story.aspx?id=23927" style="color: #003366;">announcement </a>on the OU intranet, there are going to be some changes to the governance of Learning Systems within the University. This will include the transfer of the Learning Systems team from LTS to IT at some point during the financial year that has just started. There is currently an implementation team drawn from LTS and IT working through the implications of this change, and hopefully I’ll be in a position to say more about these changes and their timing in the next update.</div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-68807287714099195472012-07-03T19:37:00.000+01:002012-11-04T19:37:31.061+00:00July 2012 Learning Systems update<br />
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The Open University VLE was updated to Moodle 2.2.3 on 3<sup>rd</sup> July 2012 In addition to the fixes and tweaks from <a href="http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_2.2.3_release_notes" style="color: #003366;">Moodle HQ</a>, we’ve also added in a bundle of new changes and development from <a href="http://learn3.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=19774" style="color: #003366;">OU developers</a> (that link will only work for OU staff).</div>
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We’re planning to continue with our monthly update schedule in August and September, and to then move back to quarterly updates in the autumn with the follow-up releases being in December 2012 and then in March 2013.</div>
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We’re also planning to carry out a maintenance update on our Moodle 1.9 system to bring that up to the latest version (<a href="http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_1.9.18_release_notes" style="color: #003366;">1.9.18</a>). We had planned to do this in mid-June, but we discovered a slight performance degradation on the server shortly before the update was scheduled to happen and we decided to hold off on the update so that we could investigate. The performance is now back to normal levels, and we’ll be going ahead with the update in mid-July. As I said in the previous post, the update doesn’t add any new features , it just allows us to add in security updates.</div>
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On the theme of server performance I wanted to take the opportunity to provide an update on our current traffic and performance figures. At the moment we’re seeing about 4.5 million transactions per week across the two main moodle installations, this is well down on the peak figures that we saw earlier in the year (over 8.5 million transactions per week) but does reflect our normal annual cycle.</div>
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Over the last few weeks availability of the VLE has been extremely good, and well over 99.8% of all our transactions have been better than our target thresholds. The actual target for each transaction varies – but for most of the common end-user transactions we aim to deliver the page back from the server in under 300 milliseconds.</div>
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Since my last post, Moodle 2.3 has been released – there’s a long list of interesting new features, some of them having been developed at the OU. If you want to know more there are release notes on the <a href="http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_2.2.3_release_notes" style="color: #003366;">Moodle.org</a> website.</div>
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We know that this release has been through some pretty rigorous functional testing within the Moodle Community to ensure that the new features all work. However before we are able to move to Moodle 2.3 we are going to carry out a programme of load tests to ensure that the system is able to operate configured the way we need it at the OU, and at the load levels we see here. At this point I don’t think that we’ll be ready to move to Moodle 2.3 in September, so that move is now likely to be part of our December update.</div>
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As part of keeping up to date with the wider elearning community, I'll be spending next week at Blackboard World. I'll be interested to see how Blackboard Learn has developed over the past year, and also to hearing a bit more about how Blackboard's new <a href="http://www.blackboard.com/About-Bb/News-Center/Press-Releases/Strategy-Update/statement-of-principles.aspx" style="color: #003366;">open source community</a> is going to work.</div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-86460761355918863252012-06-06T19:36:00.000+01:002012-11-06T12:09:49.570+00:00June 2012 Learning Systems Update<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrOvD8U6LFqaLMdPvyltoz0aJw4DC7IgSso7gPIjhfJlnV1EOB2vNkLcshwzUm9C6prb761HD-G74-6yN5JtxC5jp_eX2jIyWNOvXAtd3Z1q7-I48AVPl7R4y3yA96UDa-UYYt23sYhXXb/s1600/StudioTime.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: #fcfcfc; clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrOvD8U6LFqaLMdPvyltoz0aJw4DC7IgSso7gPIjhfJlnV1EOB2vNkLcshwzUm9C6prb761HD-G74-6yN5JtxC5jp_eX2jIyWNOvXAtd3Z1q7-I48AVPl7R4y3yA96UDa-UYYt23sYhXXb/s320/StudioTime.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
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I’ve been doing a Learning Systems podcast each month (with the exception of my recent ‘sabbatical’) since December 2008. These podcasts are <a href="http://podcast.open.ac.uk/oulife/podcast-lts-vle-news" style="color: #003366;">available</a> to the Open University community but not more widely. It occurred to me recently that I could (in the spirit of recycling) turn the scripts from these podcasts into a monthly posting here too – trimmed or extended where I get too OU specific.</div>
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At the time of the May post the Learning Systems team were still spending quite a lot of time grappling with the degraded performance we saw when we upgraded from Moodle 2.1 to 2.2 in early April. Most of our users wouldn’t have spotted the degradation in performance – but on the servers we could see that the typical time it took to deliver a page within Moodle had jumped from around 300 ms to just over 500 ms. In itself perhaps not a figure to panic about, but something that we felt that we needed to both understand and remedy. We were eventually able to isolate the problem to the new mechanism for handling context in Moodle 2.2 – and particularly to the sort of indexing required in PostgreSQL to support the context handling at OU scales. Once we got our heads round the indexing, we saw performance jump back to the sort of figures we had with Moodle 2.1. Panic over, for now at least. The saga of the move to Moodle 2.2, has made us revisit the timetable we had in mind for deploying Moodle 2.3. We had been planning to deploy 2.3 in either August or September - with the latter being more likely give the slip in the release. We now think that we need to do some serious load testing on Moodle 2.3 (as it’s configured at the OU) before can unleash it on our users, which will inevitably introduce some delay into the deployment. There are a number of features in 2.3 that we want to bring into service here – not least the one’s that we’ve developed – so we will be bringing the new version into service at soon as we can.</div>
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Once we’ve got our collective heads around Moodle 2.3, we’ll turn our attention to Moodle 2.4. The provisional specification for Moodle 2.4 mentions incorporating both the ForumNG and OUwiki. Both of these were developed at the OU and shared with the community, and I’d be absolutely delighted to see these formally adopted into Moodle. I’m sure there will be some work for developers here to do to smooth the way forward, and we’ll do whatever we need to do to help this happen.</div>
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In more routine business, we’re still gradually moving OU modules (courses in Moodle-speak) from our Moodle 1.9 installation through onto the newer 2.2 installation. We’re doing this gradually as each module ends so that our students don’t see a sudden change in mid-presentation. At the moment Moodle 1.9 is seeing around 4.5M transactions each week, and Moodle 2.2 about 2.3 M – we expect that balance to switch round as we go through the summer and into the autumn.</div>
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We’ve also started work on refreshing the real-time tools we use alongside Moodle. We are currently running with Elluminate 10 (from Elluminate when we bought into it, now from Blackboard) – and we’ve just started the procurement exercise to allow us to either continue with Blackboard Collaborate for a further period of time, or to move to an alternative platform. There is more information about the procurement exercise<a href="http://in-tendhost.co.uk/openuniversity/" style="color: #003366;">elsewhere</a>.</div>
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And finally, and only relevant to OU folks, there will be a update to the both VLE installations during June. On Tuesday 12th June we'll be updating the new VLE - the biggest single change being the new HTML Activities tool within Structured Content - significantly improving the ability to embed HTML4/HTML5 activities within the VLE. On Tuesday 19th June we'll be updating the old VLE - no new features being added, just minor maintenance updates.</div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-86377748969107764812012-05-01T19:35:00.000+01:002012-11-06T12:10:08.552+00:00The Wood and the Trees<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaT18km_38us9i2OSWwsEDZDyDoRqN-WfFznasogJqU1EzWHbuV5TTTsLHlMYe2_kpx2Md15ML-p-qH5RHH_ogFD4oVQ-VHhSfNH3ak_5CeWymxeDk-wU9HtwZJqevKFGZiatpQ7dvkU9F/s1600/DSC_5230_edited-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: #fcfcfc; clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaT18km_38us9i2OSWwsEDZDyDoRqN-WfFznasogJqU1EzWHbuV5TTTsLHlMYe2_kpx2Md15ML-p-qH5RHH_ogFD4oVQ-VHhSfNH3ak_5CeWymxeDk-wU9HtwZJqevKFGZiatpQ7dvkU9F/s320/DSC_5230_edited-1.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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Over the last six months I've been as far south as South Georgia and as far North as the North Cape. I've taken more pictures of penguins than is sensible, I've seen the Northern Lights on ten occasions, I've been mugged by a striated caracara, chased by antarctic fur seals, learnt to drive a team of Siberian huskies and realised just how cold -20C feels.</div>
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And despite (or maybe because of) my absence the Learning Systems team at the OU has kept going, delivering regular VLE releases adding new functionality and working to migrate OU modules from the old Moodle 1.9 VLE onto the new Moodle 2 platform.</div>
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As I've got re-immersed in OU activities over the last few weeks, I've had the chance to reflect on what has changed while I've been away.</div>
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Learning System developments tend to be bundled up in monthly releases and, inevitably, these releases usually involve incremental, rather than earth shattering, changes. However over a six month period the incremental changes all add up - and coming back to the party after a while away it really is quite dramatic how far things have moved on.</div>
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<li>We've now migrated about 50% of OU modules onto the new platform (currently using Moodle 2.2.2), and we're on track to have almost all modules moved over by the end of 2012. At the moment the new platform is carrying about 25% of the total load (in terms of transactions).</li>
<li>We've brought Elluminate 10 into service at the OU - and about a third of our real-time collaboration traffic is now on that version of the platform.</li>
<li>We've finally turned off the FirstClass conferencing system.</li>
<li>We've rolled out OU Annotate to everyone in the OU Community - and added lots more new features to it. We are seeing really encouraging usage levels on this too.</li>
<li>We've specified and started to develop a new version of the OpenLearn platform, based on Moodle 2.</li>
<li>We've specified and done lots of development work to support the OU's move to qualitifications-based teaching.</li>
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Within the VLE itself,</div>
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<li>We've added lots of refinements to the collaborative tools collection (the OU versions of the blog, forum and wiki), most visibly making these tools all much more consistent.</li>
<li>The Quiz Engine continues to evolve with every release adding a few more question types (we're now up to 23 different types). There has also been lots of work carried out to redevelop the STACK computer algebra system as a Moodle question type. We've been demonstrating that development to the Maths Faculty at the OU, and we expect to have it ready for release in Autumn 2012.</li>
<li>We've also added extra features to Structured Content (the OU's XML-based authoring system) to further enrich the learning materials that students can get access to on the VLE.</li>
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Any one of these developments probably wouldn't have seemed big enough to need a blog post celebrating their completion but seen together they look like a really impressive collection of developments.</div>
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Maybe I should go away more often.</div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-72706339911400738042011-09-18T19:34:00.000+01:002012-11-04T19:34:52.788+00:0010 More Days<br />
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After a couple of years of contemplation and a lot of time talking to people and following the blogs and tweets of various career-breakers, I’m about to join their ranks.</div>
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At the end of September I’ll be packing up my desk at the Open University, handing over the Learning and Teaching Systems reins to my colleague Paul (<a href="http://twitter.com/paulbeeby" style="color: #003366;">twitter.com/paulbeeby</a> - I hope he’s going to start tweeting soon so I can keep track of what’s happening), and leaving Moodle and e-learning behind for six months.</div>
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The first three months are planned – Sri Lanka, Shetland and the South Atlantic - but although I’ve got lots of ideas for the second three months (including some places not starting with S), I have for the first time in a very long time got no firm plans.</div>
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One of my frustrations, over the last five years particularly, has been the lack of time to think about the trips I’ve been fitting in around work commitments. I’ve rushed off somewhat manically to the airport as soon as I could, and spent as much time away as possible – and then plunged back into work again. One consequence has been not enough time to go through the photographs I’ve taken or to put together the blog postings, or any longer pieces of writing, from the trips.</div>
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My hope during the six months way from the office is to have time to make the trips a bit slower than they might otherwise have had to be, to reflect on and to write about my travelling, to spend some longer chunks of time in our house in Shetland, and maybe get re-enthused about e-learning.</div>
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I don’t plan to post anything further on this blog until next Easter – although I will be posting on my travel/photography blog (<a href="http://rossmac.blogspot.com/" style="color: #003366;">rossmac.blogspot.com</a>), and I’ll be tweeting (<a href="http://twitter.com/rossmackenzie" style="color: #003366;">twitter.com/rossmackenzie</a>) when connectivity allows.</div>
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Sitting in my study in Oxford on a Sunday morning, I have lots of conflicting thoughts about the time away. Part of me can’t picture being away from the OU for such a long time (I first joined the University in late 1995 – and the commute to Milton Keynes is just part of what I do most days).</div>
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Part of me can’t picture doing anything other than returning to the OU in April. And yet another part of me can’t picture getting back into the formality of the daily commute again.</div>
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I'm certainly looking forward to the opportunities this winter will present - and I will give the occasional thought to the roll-out of Moodle 2 at the OU.</div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-74726885184369144372011-07-05T19:33:00.000+01:002012-11-04T19:33:56.791+00:00Moodle 2 in UK HE<br />
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On 18<sup>th</sup> June, the OU hosted a meeting of UK Higher Education institutions who are either in the process of moving to Moodle 2, or who are very close to setting off on that journey.</div>
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This brought together about 60 individuals from about 20 institutions, and gave us the chance to talk about what we’re doing here and to learn about what is happening elsewhere. It was good to see so many people here and to have the opportunity to talk with other folks facing the same issues, challenges and opportunities.</div>
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My presentation from the day is available on slideshare</div>
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<strong><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/ram65/moving-the-open-university-to-moodle-21" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank" title="Moving the Open University to Moodle 2.1">Moving the Open University to Moodle 2.1</a></strong>
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View more <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">presentations</a> from <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/ram65" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">Ross Mackenzie</a></div>
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The full timetable for the event is available at <a href="https://sites.google.com/a/gapps.open.ac.uk/hemoodle/home-1" style="color: #003366;">https://sites.google.com/a/gapps.open.ac.uk/hemoodle/home-1</a> (and we’ll be adding the presentations shortly).</div>
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One of the outcomes of the meeting was agreement what we should have regular meetings like this – and the suggestion was they we might have two face-to-face and two online meetings each year.</div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-85629049847709531992011-05-05T19:32:00.000+01:002012-11-04T19:32:55.787+00:00OU Learning and Teaching Systems blogs<br />
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I was putting together a list of the various work-related blogs that members of the OU Learning and Teaching Systems Team keep - thought it might be useful to share it.</div>
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Sam Marshall <a href="http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=11" style="color: #003366;">http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=11</a></div>
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Tim Hunt <a href="http://tjhunt.blogspot.com/" style="color: #003366;">http://tjhunt.blogspot.com/</a></div>
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Jenny Gray <a href="http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=60" style="color: #003366;">http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=60</a></div>
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Jason Platts (for the JISC-funded DOULS project) <a href="http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/douls/" style="color: #003366;">http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/douls/</a></div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-65741390301530910202011-04-26T19:31:00.000+01:002012-11-04T19:32:14.456+00:00MoodleMoot UK 2011 Presentations<br />
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There were four presentations from the Open University Learning and Teaching Systems team at the MoodleMoot last week.</div>
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Sam Marshall talked about working with Moodle HQ <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/sammarshall_ou/how-to-change-moodle" style="color: #003366;" title="http://www.slideshare.net/sammarshall_ou/how-to-change-moodle">http://www.slideshare.net/sammarshall_ou/how-to-change-moodle</a></div>
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Anthony Forth talked about recent work with mobile devices and Moodle <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/anthonyforth/ou-mobile-and-moodle" style="color: #003366;" title="http://www.slideshare.net/anthonyforth/ou-mobile-and-moodle">http://www.slideshare.net/anthonyforth/ou-mobile-and-moodle</a></div>
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Tim Hunt talked about the new quiz engine (he gave his talk using the quiz engine, so there aren’t slides to link to – there will be videos shortly and I’ll post links to those when they’re available).</div>
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I talked about how we’re going to be using Moodle 2 <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/ram65/moving-the-ou-to-moodle-20" style="color: #003366;" title="http://www.slideshare.net/ram65/moving-the-ou-to-moodle-20">http://www.slideshare.net/ram65/moving-the-ou-to-moodle-20</a></div>
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And we're going to be hosting an event (in Milton Keynes on June 20th) on using Moodle 2 in the HE sector. There's more information at <a class="twitter-timeline-link" data-expanded-url="https://sites.google.com/a/gapps.open.ac.uk/hemoodle/" href="http://goo.gl/P1lf6" rel="nofollow" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank" title="https://sites.google.com/a/gapps.open.ac.uk/hemoodle/">http://goo.gl/P1lf6</a></div>
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Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-33294740471856026972011-04-05T19:30:00.000+01:002012-11-04T19:31:02.884+00:00It's all about the Numbers<br />
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Over the last few months most of the development team at the OU have been concentrating on activities related to getting Moodle 2 up and running here - and particularly in migrating the OU developed components and plug-ins for Moodle so that both we and others can use these in Moodle 2 as it gets deployed.</div>
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Our intention at the moment is to start using Moodle 2 with a small number of students this summer, and to gradually move all OU courses across to Moodle 2 over the following 12 months. One of the issues for us is around having confidence in the ability of the new Moodle installation to cope with the sheer volume of traffic that our current Moodle 1.9 installation carries, so I thought it might be interesting say a bit about our monitoring of Moodle and the volume of traffic we're handling at the moment.</div>
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We have two almost-real-time systems monitoring the VLE.</div>
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There is a dashboard report on the VLE which lets us see the activity level over last 5 minutes, last 60 minutes and last 24 hours. We can see how many users are on the system, and also get a indication of which parts of the system they are using.</div>
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<img alt="OU VLE dashboard report" src="http://www.stileassociates.co.uk/images/dashboard.jpg" title="OU VLE dashboard report" /></div>
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Alongside this we feed VLE transaction information out of the VLE to a centralised OU monitoring system which lets us see how traffic varies over the day. The curve below is a fairly typical weekday curve showing our traffic climbing gradually through the morning to our day-time plateau (with a little peak at lunchtime) before a tea-time dip and then the evening peak.</div>
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<img alt="OU VLE daily performance " src="http://www.stileassociates.co.uk/images/ttm.jpg" title="OU VLE daily performance " /></div>
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So what are these tools telling us?</div>
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Firstly, the OU VLE is busy and has been getting dramatically busier over the last 18 months.</div>
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In February 2010 (February is always a really busy time in the OU's teaching calendar) our busiest day saw just under 700,000 logged transactions from just under 50,000 unique users, in February 2011 we saw the daily traffic peak at 1.4M transactions from 60,000 users (and on 21 days in February 2011 we had over 1M transactions).</div>
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Over the last 15 months we've been logging both the total number of transactions and the total number of unique users we've seen each day. Both of these show similar patterns through the year - but while the user numbers have grown by between 20% and 30%, transaction figures have grown by over 100% over the last 12 months.</div>
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<img alt="OU VLE transaction figures" src="http://www.stileassociates.co.uk/images/transactions.jpg" title="OU VLE transaction figures" /></div>
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<img alt="OU VLE users" src="http://www.stileassociates.co.uk/images/users.jpg" title="OU VLE users" /></div>
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The next question is, what are the users doing while they're using the VLE? The short answer is talking to each other via the forums - over the last 15 months we've seen the number of forum posts created each month climb from around 14,000 to close to 500,000. Again the curve shows the same shape but climbs even more dramatically than the transaction numbers.</div>
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<img alt="OU VLE forum posts" src="http://www.stileassociates.co.uk/images/forumposts.jpg" title="OU VLE forum posts" /></div>
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Now we know both the scale and the type of traffic that we can expect from our users, we need to ensure that our Moodle 2 installation can cope with this. Hopefully I'll be able to post again in a few weeks to let you know.</div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-29720465771059165122011-03-24T18:28:00.000+00:002012-11-04T19:29:26.906+00:00OU at Moodle Moot UK 2011<br />
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I'm delighted that, despite the pressures we're currently under to bring Moodle 2 into service at the OU, there will be four folks from the development team talking at the Moot this year.</div>
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Anthony Forth will be talking about our recent work in supporting mobile users of Moodle: <i><strong>"Mobile, Moodle and the Open University"</strong>.</i></div>
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Sam Marshall will be talking about how we've been working with Martin and his team; <i><strong>"How to change Moodle: working with Moodle HQ"</strong></i>.</div>
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Tim Hunt will be talking about the latest quiz related developments: <i><strong>"Introducing the new Moodle question engine"</strong></i>.</div>
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And I'll be talking about <i><strong>"Moving the Open University to Moodle 2.0"</strong></i>. I'll pick up on some of the questions I raised at the end of last year's Moot presentation - and talk about how we are planning to migrate our entire student population from Moodle 1.9 to Moodle 2.0 over the next 12 months.</div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-44311004293795478082010-11-21T19:27:00.000+00:002012-11-04T19:28:19.324+00:00Moving to Moodle 2<br />
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In my presentation at the UK MoodleMoot earlier this year I raised a number of questions about what the OU is going to do next with our Virtual Learning Environment – and I’ve been meaning to say something about how we’re answering those questions.</div>
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To cut to the chase, we are going to stick with Moodle, and we are planning to use Moodle 2 very significantly closer to its ‘out of the box’ form.</div>
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During the summer we commissioned a review of Moodle and a number of possible alternatives in both the commercial and open-source markets, and eventually came to the view that, for the OU, continuing with Moodle was the right way forward. However, we do recognise that we made too many localisations in our adoption of Moodle 1.x – we will be making substantially fewer with Moodle 2.x.</div>
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We also guessed, back in the early summer, that Moodle 2 probably wasn’t going to make it out the door until sometime in the Autumn (at the earliest), and we’ve been assuming that there wouldn’t be a proper/stable Moodle 2.0 release until about the turn of the year.</div>
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Our plan, at this point, is to have a fairly complete new OUVLE in place in March 2011. This will be based on Moodle 2 and will have most (but probably not all) of the major OU contribs we developed for Moodle 1.x migrated to run in Moodle 2. We’re not intending that this release gets used with our learner community; it will be primarily used for testing, particularly to allow us to be confident that Moodle 2 will be able to carry the load we expect. At the moment our Moodle 1.9 installation is seeing something like 1,000,000 transactions (from 50,000 users) a day and these numbers are both still increasing.</div>
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The first student-ready release of our new OUVLE will come online in June 2011, with a follow-up release in September 2011. We’re planning to run the new OUVLE alongside the existing Moodle-1.9-based OUVLE for at least 12 months, and we’ll be gradually moving students over to the new OUVLE during that period.</div>
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The new OUVLE will also have significantly more facilities than the current VLE. In addition to enhancing a number of the standard tools that we use (the OU versions of the forum, blog and wiki, and the new quiz engine that will be part of Moodle 2.1) we’re also carrying out a programme of developments to improve (i) Moodle’s support for mobile devices, (ii) integration with Google Apps for Education, (iii) facilities for both personalisation and the handling of user generated content.</div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-43065587401785753022010-05-04T19:26:00.000+01:002012-11-04T19:27:16.256+00:00Moodle 2.0 - and rivals.<br />
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The arrival of Moodle 2.0 is clearly a very important landmark for the entire Moodle Community, however for the OU it is also going present a number of challenges. In my talk at the UK MoodleMoot I highlighted the fact that the OU has made something like 2000 localisations to the standard Moodle, and that this did represent something of a challenge to us in moving.</div>
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As part of understanding that move we want to commission a study of the alternatives to Moodle 2.0. We want someone to compare the functionality that Moodle 2.0 is going to offer with the functionality currently (or in the near future) offered by Blackboard, Desire2Learn and Sakai.</div>
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There is more information about the study on the OU tenders website</div>
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<a href="http://in-tendhost.co.uk/openuniversity" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">http://in-tendhost.co.uk/openuniversity</a></div>
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We are asking for bids to undertake this work to be submitted (via the tenders website) by 14th May 2010, and we want the study to be completed by 30th June 2010.</div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-78216966447590373922010-04-18T19:25:00.000+01:002012-11-04T19:26:08.890+00:00VLE Development at The Open University<br />
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At the MoodleMoot recently I was asked a number of questions both directly and via twitter about the model that the OU is using in our VLE development - a blog posting seems like the best way to describe what we do.</div>
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The model isn't based on any formal methodology as such but has essentially evolved to meet the needs of the OU. There are certainly 'agile' elements in the process - at least in that we are constantly adjusting our developments to meet changing requirements from the OU community while still ensuring that we are able to thoroughly test developments before we release them to our student community.</div>
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We now have a quarterly release cycle, and we try to minimise the number of changes between those releases. Each cycle covers a period of approximately ten months starting with a requirements gathering phase going through to a three month period when a particular release is ‘in service’.</div>
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmackenzie/4557205449/" style="color: #003366;" title="GANTT_chart by Ross Mackenzie, on Flickr"><img alt="GANTT_chart" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4025/4557205449_24c8f2c021.jpg" style="border: none;" /></a></div>
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1. Requirements Gathering. For a couple of years we have had a process (and activities) that encouraged the submission of requirements ahead of each of the four releases in the year. This lead to a lot of requirements being submitted, but the development team had difficulties in keeping the submitters informed about their requests. To improve on this we’re just on the point of rolling out a requirements gathering database into which any member of the University can enter a requirement, and then come back to the database later to see the progress in implementing their requirement, or indeed why it’s not been possible to address that requirement yet.</div>
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At a pre-announced date approximately six months before a release is due to go live, we pull together the most pressing requirements from the database and from other sources around the University and put together a development plan for the release.</div>
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The decisions here will be based on (i) operational requirements, for example changes needed to improve or preserve the VLE performance, (ii) addressing changing University strategic plans and (iii) the value of particular developments for large numbers of students.</div>
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We regard each development cycle as a distinct activity, so we reassess all the new and outstanding requirements at the start of each development cycle - this means that new requirements may (particularly if they are performance related or address a particular strategic target) displace requirements that have been in the "queue" for a long time.</div>
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2. Once the development priorities have been determined for the release, the development tasks will be allocated to the development teams (each team having one leading technical developer working with a number of technical developers). At this time we will prepare a development environment for the new release, merging the latest stable release from moodle.org with our code base. This then forms the underlying code base for the next three months development work. Each developer has their own development environment and is able, once they are happy with their development code (and it’s been reviewed by one of the lead developer), to commit changes into the CVS respository. One of the challenges with a large number of parallel developments is that changes made by one developer can impact on code committed by another developer - ensuring that all the developers are aware of the range of developments certainly helps, but we are currently experimenting with a continuous integration system that will highlight problems very early in the process.</div>
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3. At the end of the development period (usually 12 or 13 weeks), the developments for the release should be functionally complete - and the statement of what’s likely to be in release that was prepared at the start of the development period gets revised. At this point new developments get passed through to the testing team, where the new developments get tested to ensure that the functionality is as required (at this point we can start preparing the user documentation for these new features). Issues raised by the testing team get logged directly in the Bugzilla system used by the development teams.</div>
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4. About four weeks after the functional testing starts we will be at a point when the new release of the VLE can be put onto our acceptance test system (this is the first rehearsal for the upgrade). The new features will have been through one round of testing and bug-fixing and then integrated with the other new features into a release candidate. This is turned over to the testing team again for two weeks of intensive testing, followed by a window for bug-fixing, then a further week of verification testing. At this point there will be a further upgrade rehearsal, before at the real upgrade. By this point in the cycle we will also have release documentation in place, and the online Computing Guide (that’s available to all users) will have been updated to reflect changes in features.</div>
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5. The upgrades to the production servers happen the on first working Tuesday of March, June, September and December, ideally, during our advertised "at-risk" periods. On some occasions, typically if there are major database changes that require the database to be reloaded, we will need a longer downtime than the "at-risk" period allows, but we try to keep the interruption to a minimum (and we do advertise the interruption well in advance). We will almost always have a catch-up release seven days after the main release to allow patches that didn’t quite make the deadline get onto the live system.</div>
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6. Once the release has gone onto the production servers we try and minimise the number of changes to the system. If there are security patches needed these will happen as soon as possible, in other cases changes that are requested will be vetted to confirm if they really are needed urgently. A change to remedy a serious problem with an assessed activity is likely to be allowed, but a cosmetic change would be queued to be included with the next scheduled release.</div>
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7. The release will then stay in service for about three months, until the next release is ready to roll.</div>
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8. We also do regular reviews of both usability and accessibility. For new features we will factor in testing periods during development, this is in addition to incremental testing on the each release, just after it goes live, either by expert testers or by student testing panels. The outputs from this testing is fed back into the development process, with urgent changes being regarded as critical patches, and other less urgent changes being queued for the next scheduled release.</div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731601168907898436.post-68917703443892849622010-04-18T19:21:00.000+01:002012-11-04T19:22:31.243+00:00Moodle at the OU<br />
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I gave a keynote presentation at the UK MoodleMoot on 13th April 2010.</div>
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In the presentation I reflected on the OU's selection of Moodle in 2005, and reported on the developments that the OU has both commissioned and carried out directly.</div>
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I also talked about the scale of the OU's current Moodle installation, and speculated about how we would be working with Moodle 2.0 once it is released.</div>
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The slides from that presentation are now available on SlideShare.</div>
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<strong><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/ram65/moodle-at-the-ou-moodle-moot-2010" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank" title="Moodle at the OU">Moodle at theOU</a></strong></div>
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A number of my colleagues also gave presentations which are now available on SlideShare</div>
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Anthony Forth - <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/guestc012431/moodlemootuk-2010-dataplus-and-mobile-moodle" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">Mobile Moodle and DataPlus</a></div>
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Jason Platts - <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/guest354b520/ou-jp-reftelstarukmoot" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">TELSTAR: Linking RefWorks with Moodle</a></div>
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Phil Butcher - <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/guestc2ddfc/why-were-altering-the-quiz" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">Assessment for Learning</a></div>
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And if you want to see the gory detail - the videos of (some of) the sessions are now <a href="http://moodlemootuk2010.org.uk/videos/" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">available online</a> too.</div>
Ross Mackenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17868419121824013601noreply@blogger.com0