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.