Virtual Learning Environment Support Contract 2012
Ref: VLEsup2012
A vendor is sought by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to deliver maintenance and technical support to ensure our Moodle and Mahara VLE services are up-to-date and operate safely and securely. The contract will initially be for 12 months, commencing on 9th January 2012.
Day-to-day VLE administration and enhancement (eg course backups, frontline support, theme and plugin updates) will be undertaken by our Learning Technologist, however site upgrades, security updates, LAMP environment maintenance and updates, disaster backup and recovery will be the responsibility of the vendor. The vendor will also advise and support on debugging performance and configuration issues.
Technical Specifications (current)
Moodle 1.9x http://moodle.rcs.ac.uk/
includes some non-core plugins (eg ForumNG, MrCute Jr Repository). BigBlueButton scheduled for Jan 2012
Mahara 1.41 http://moodle.rcs.ac.uk/mahara/
Both are hosted on an Ubuntu LAMP server with peer networking enabled. User authentication is by LDAP from Active Directory; NTLM authentication is currently being investigated for implementation.
Technical Specifications (future)
In summer 2012 we will be switching to Moodle 2.x (probably 2.2 depending on stability of releases). We will additionally be upgrading to Mahara 1.5 when a stable release is available.
As part of the major upgrade we are planning to move to a WAMP or WIMP environment, and require a vendor with experience of configuring and supporting Moodle and Mahara in a Windows server environment as well as Linux. Proven experience of upgrading and transferring content from a Moodle 1.9 site to Moodle 2.x is essential, as is familiarity with Mahara 1.4.
UPDATE:
Our preference is to move to a Windows server but other server environment options will be evaluated where a case is made.
Support availability
Both Moodle and Mahara are actively used by staff and students throughout the day and early evening, and to an extent at weekends. The ability to work flexibly to minimise disruption from maintenance by scheduling downtime work for weekends or outside standard office hours would therefore be desirable from the successful vendor.
Potential vendors should also outline any processes and timescales they have in place for detection and resolving critical issues – for example virus infection, site spamming/hacking and server/site crashes.
Tendering
Vendors are invited to submit a brief tender document including costs (£UK) for delivery of this service. The Royal Conservatoire IS Department take several factors into account when choosing a new vendor for a specific project or maintenance contract renewal. The key elements taken into account are:
- value for money
- technical solution
- technical expertise
- level of support
- cost
All submissions – and queries - should be made to Gordon McLeod, Learning Technologist g.mcleod1@rcs.ac.uk by 4pm on Monday 19th December 2011, quoting reference VLEsup2012.