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.

OU at Moodle Moot UK 2011

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.

Anthony Forth will be talking about our recent work in supporting mobile users of Moodle:  "Mobile, Moodle and the Open University".

Sam Marshall will be talking about how we've been working with Martin and his team; "How to change Moodle: working with Moodle HQ".

Tim Hunt will be talking about the latest quiz related developments: "Introducing the new Moodle question engine".

And I'll be talking about "Moving the Open University to Moodle 2.0".  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.

Moving to Moodle 2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Moodle 2.0 - and rivals.

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.

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.

There is more information about the study on the OU tenders website

http://in-tendhost.co.uk/openuniversity

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.