The Evolution of Learning

Although I've been blogging enthusiastically about photography and remote places 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Moodle 2.5 Multimedia Cookbook by Silvina P Hillar

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Note: Packt Publishing invited me to review this title, and provided an evaluation copy. The Moodle 2.5 Multimedia Cookbook is available from the Packt website.

March 2013 OU Learning Systems Update

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We’re also in the midst of development activities for the June VLE update.

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.

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.

We expect the update to happen on Tuesday 4th June.

And it will include….
• Improvements to the Forum moderation tools
• Enhancements to the OU Anywhere tools
• An improved version of the OU Annotate system
• Improvements to the Wolfson Open Science Lab platform
• Improvements to the Quals on-line platform
• The first release of a new ‘Moodle for Exams’ platform
• An update to the OpenMark platform
• 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

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.

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.

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.

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!

A Memoire in Eight Bits

Clearing out my desk drawer, in anticipation of escape, revealed a rich collection of old business cards, including lots of mine.

A history of online learning in eight bits (of card)?

 1995
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.

 1999
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.

 2000
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.

 2002
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.

 2005
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.   

 2007
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.

 2010
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.

2012

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.

Head of IT Development (Learning Systems), The Open University

I guess I really must be leaving.

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.

The advert is on the university jobs website - go on, have a look - the closing date is 28th March 2013.

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.

The annual leave allocation is pretty good - as my travel blog over the last few years might suggest

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.

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 Yes has been a challenge, but a good challenge.

If you want to know more about the job - either go to the OU jobs website or get in touch with me directly.

By the way, you need to bring your own boots - I'm taking these ones with me.

Learning Systems Update - February 2013

Since the last update in December, 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.

First traffic, on Monday 4^th 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.

The next VLE release is currently in pre-release testing, and the upgrade is expected to happen early on Tuesday 5^th March 2013.

In this release we’ll be

•          Moving to Moodle 2.3.3 as underlying platform

•          Introducing a redesigned version of the OU blog, to improve consistency with other collaborative tools within the VLE

•          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

•          Introducing a Statement of Participation, which will be used for Non-Accrediting Learning

•          Making improvements to wide range of module administrative tools

•          Releasing the first version of the Wolfson Open Science Laboratory platform

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.

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.

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.

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.

And finally, as regular readers will know, I’ve recently made the decision 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.

Plan B

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.  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.

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.

I’m going to be leaving the OU at the end of March, to look for interesting new things do. 

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Anything interesting considered.  Well, as long as it’s legal.

December 2012 Learning Systems Update

[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].

Welcome to the final Learning Systems Update of 2012.

We’ve just rounded off a very busy and productive year for the learning systems team by releasing a major VLE update.

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.

We’re also adding in a lot of new local OU features – some of which I’ve been promising for several months. 

There are quite a number of improvements related to quizzes

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.

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.

Our structured content tools get a number of improvements too

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.

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.

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.

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.

As we move into the New Year there will some big changes for the learning system team.

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.

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. 

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.

November 2012 Learning Systems Update

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^th December.  

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.

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^th December.  There will be notices on both StudentHome and TutorHome, warning users that the system is going to be unavailable once we've confirmed the timing.

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.

As I mentioned last month 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 OU Anywhere project.  

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.

As we finalise the release features we’ll be putting together a set of release notes which will appear on the Online Learning Systems website.

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.  

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.

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.

At the end of October two members of the Learning Systems team attended the Moodle DeveloperConference in Perth in Western Australia

This event addressed a lot of the challenges facing both us and other large-scale Moodle users.

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.

New and Old

Welcome.  I've decided to move my work blog from it's location on the Open University VLE to a new home here.

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.

And if the URL here is just too long to remember - try tinyurl.com/rossmac

October 2012 Learning Systems update

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.

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.

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 moodle.org forums. 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.

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 Sam Marshall's blog.

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.

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 Jenny Gray's blog, and if you are a member of the OU community you can get more information and try it out at http://students.open.ac.uk/annotate

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.

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.

September 2012 Learning Systems update

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.

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 Structured Content tools within the VLE.  (Apology: The links within this post are only going to be reachable by members of the OU community)

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.

There are full details of all these changes in the release notes which you can find on releases page of the online learning systems guide website.

We’ve also updated the guidance notes, the computing guide and the style guide to reflect recent changes to the VLE toolset.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The final topic I want to mention in this update relates to Learning Systems team rather than to the Learning systems platforms.

As some of you will no doubt have seen from the announcement 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.

July 2012 Learning Systems update

The Open University VLE was updated to Moodle 2.2.3 on 3^rd July 2012 In addition to the fixes and tweaks from  Moodle HQ, we’ve also added in a bundle of new changes and development from OU developers (that link will only work for OU staff).

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.

We’re also planning to carry out a maintenance update on our Moodle 1.9 system to bring that up to the latest version (1.9.18).   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.

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.

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.

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 Moodle.org website.

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.

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 open source community is going to work.

June 2012 Learning Systems Update

I’ve been doing a Learning Systems podcast each month (with the exception of my recent ‘sabbatical’) since December 2008.  These podcasts are available 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 exerciseelsewhere.

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.

The Wood and the Trees

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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).
• 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.
• We've finally turned off the FirstClass conferencing system.
• 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.
• We've specified and started to develop a new version of the OpenLearn platform, based on Moodle 2.
• We've specified and done lots of development work to support the OU's move to qualitifications-based teaching.

Within the VLE itself,

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.

Maybe I should go away more often.

10 More Days

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.

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 (twitter.com/paulbeeby - 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.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t plan to post anything further on this blog until next Easter – although I will be posting on my travel/photography blog (rossmac.blogspot.com), and I’ll be tweeting (twitter.com/rossmackenzie) when connectivity allows.

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).

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.

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.

Moodle 2 in UK HE

On 18^th 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.

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.

My presentation from the day is available on slideshare

Moving the Open University to Moodle 2.1 

View more presentations from Ross Mackenzie

The full timetable for the event is available at https://sites.google.com/a/gapps.open.ac.uk/hemoodle/home-1 (and we’ll be adding the presentations shortly).

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.

OU Learning and Teaching Systems blogs

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.

Sam Marshall      http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=11

Tim Hunt   http://tjhunt.blogspot.com/

Jenny Gray      http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=60

Jason Platts (for the JISC-funded DOULS project)  http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/douls/

MoodleMoot UK 2011 Presentations

There were four presentations from the Open University Learning and Teaching Systems team at the MoodleMoot last week.

Sam Marshall talked about working with Moodle HQ    http://www.slideshare.net/sammarshall_ou/how-to-change-moodle

Anthony Forth talked about recent work with mobile devices and Moodle     http://www.slideshare.net/anthonyforth/ou-mobile-and-moodle

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).

I talked about how we’re going to be using Moodle 2   http://www.slideshare.net/ram65/moving-the-ou-to-moodle-20

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 http://goo.gl/P1lf6

It's all about the Numbers

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.

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.

We have two almost-real-time systems monitoring the VLE.

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.

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.

So what are these tools telling us?

Firstly, the OU VLE is busy and has been getting dramatically busier over the last 18 months.

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).

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.

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.

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.