3. Background
Government target that all pupils will be able to access
a personalised online workspace, by 2008
Trials indicated strong school support for Moodle in the
region - many early adopting schools
CLEO chooses to provide Moodle for all schools, with a
strong emphasis on ensuring support and development
for schools
Centralised provision aiming to provide a fully
supported, resilient learning platform which schools
can depend upon
4. Moodle for CLEO Schools
Each school gets their own instance of
Moodle (with full admin control)
Centrally managed backups, upgrades
and server resilience
Phone/ email technical support
Curriculum based support run by
Learning Consultants
CLEO Moodle for schools to share ideas
and resources
5. Training
Free training courses offered to all schools
11 different training courses running throughout school
year
In-depth admin training run by Synergy Learning
Shorter course-creator focused courses run internally
by Local Authorities
Over 600 school staff trained to date
6. Where we started
December 2005, migrated 3 schools from external
hosting
Moodle 1.5.3
Secondary schools involved in Cumbria 14-19
Pathfinder project
7. Today:
Primary Secondary 430 Moodles
Support
200
100,000 registered
users
150
20,000 active in last
100 month
50 10,000 active in last
week
0
Sept 06 Jan 07 Oct 07 4,000 active in last day
No. of Moodles
8. Problematic Stats..
339 custom themes to manage.
34,000 e-mails sent daily
41,000 moodle cron jobs run daily
500,000,000 lines of code (potentially)
10. Upgrading is our biggest
hosting challenge
Big Drawbacks:
Downtime for upgrade
400+ chances for things to go wrong
Increased support burden as schools get familiar/
discover new bugs
Amending training, support materials and ensuring
support staff are up to date
11. Why upgrade?
Features!
Parity with Moodle core
Bug fixing and reporting
Inclusion of new features to core
Moodle.org as accurate support resource
Security/Stability
12. Designing for upgrades
Shared codebase
1.1 Million Lines of code is enough to keep up with!
We can’t support per-school code changes
Limited third-party modules
Avoiding ‘local-hacks’ - push to core where possible
13. Tactics for success
Its important to ‘Live the Community’ and use
judgement
Allow time for bugs to emerge
Try and stay current, no longer than 1 major release
More beneficial to put bug-fixing/testing into new
releases
Test, test, test, test!
Backup and prepare for fast rollback!
14. Keeping up with Moodle
A Full-time job:
Subscribed to moodle-cvs
mailing list
Watch tracker items
Forums!
Helps: upgrades, security,
support
15. Upgrades are a strength of
Moodle
Moodle is very good with upgrades, we’ve survived:
Moodle 1.6 - Unicode without trashing our data
Moodle 1.7 - Roles (though still requires education)
Moodle 1.8 - XHTML + lots of broken themes
17. Themes
Have to be treated like code
This is problematic for uploads
Developed a self-service interface to give access to:
Upload themes
Download live themes
Future:
Live tweaking of themes
18. Theme Validation
We process each theme uploaded and try:
Examine structure for sanity
To correct obviously incorrect lack of $CFG theme
variables (breaks on our setup) MDL-6784
Only allow images in pix/ dirs
Look for glaringly obvious security issues
If there is a problem, upload is delayed for inspection
19. A request to theme authors
Please use Cascading Style Sheets like they were
intended!
Unnecessarily overridden theme styles caused us
major issues in the 1.8 upgrade preparation
If you don’t use theme variables your theme will
break on our setup
21. Culture Change
The arrival of VLE’s into UK schools brings a change in
school IT culture
MIS Data has not been widely used and integrated with
School IT Systems
While many schools often have centralised systems
such as AD, they rarely contain ‘curriculum data’
MIS System Administrators not necessarily IT
focused
This isn’t a problem for moodle to solve!
22. Enrolment Plugins
School environment is currently very different to big
enterprises
Problems:
MIS data can be of poor quality
The data from an MIS system doesn’t map well onto
how a school wishes to structure a moodle course
Schools often lack the skills and infrastructure to
craft data into format required by enrolment plugins
23. Typical School Enrolment
Manual enrolment
Teacher faced with the burden of assigning each
student individually to their courses
This is a major barrier for many schools
24. Our Solution
Simple, two-step import from MIS System to Moodle
Capita SIMS
Serco CMIS
Provides ‘enrolment groups’ as a shortcut to assign a
class at a time
Keeping choice in teachers hands
Generate all users for schools who wish to have it
We use standard profile fields for class linking - works
with other user creation methods
26. Limitations
One-time Import
Not reflected as a ‘group enrolment’
Changes in groups not reflected in courses
No mapping to course groups
No facility to edit groups - trust MIS data
Manual exports from MIS system
28. An Identity Problem
Dealing with 1000 separate organisations
No central identity system
1000 different setups
Bigger schools have MS AD
Smaller schools often have nothing
Most schools use manual authentication
Generated by CSV/ MIS Upload
29. Centralised Authentication
Increasing requirement for centralised authentication
system throughout CLEO
Keep power in the hands of schools
Provide central system for those without one
Provide Single Sign On across services
30. Authentication & Enrolment
Hoped that central authentication systems can be
linked with MIS systems to help solve the enrolment
problem
Dynamic group changes
Account provisioning from MIS system
Big Project, Lots of Questions, will take some time!
32. Overview
Replication
File Servers File Servers
(40 TB) (40TB)
Dual Master Replication
Database Database
Server Server
Built on Open Source Scaled as necessary Web Frontend Web Frontend Web Frontend Web Frontend Scaled as necessary
Software Mail
Servers
Mail
Servers
Emphasis on high
availability & scalability
Built on the following Open Source Software:
Powered by
33. Shared Codebase
Initally used UnionFS UnionFS
Perfect for themes My School files
/themes/
/myschooltheme/
Suffered reliability
problems +
/themes/
Switched to symbolic Moodle 1.8
/standard/
links ( $CFG->themedir
for themes) =
/themes/
My School Moodle /myschooltheme/
/standard/
34. Problem Areas: Messaging
Inefficient, continual refreshing
Lunchtimes/break-times cause huge load peaks as
schools let pupils message each other
Would like to see a more efficient implementation of
messaging
35. Problem Areas: File Storage
Continual growth in
usage
Many content providers
eager to get into moodle
No way for schools to
get large amounts of
content into moodle
36. Problem Areas: Mail
Huge amount of mail generated
Often not required in school scenario, particularly
primary level
Puts large strain on existing infrastructure
Looking to filter early and drop mail
