Hardware and performance

AFAIK, the NZVLE project is the biggest Moodle deployment: 30K users and 6K classes. You'll see their members posting to the forums here. They recently prepared a very nice Moodle Enterprise document which was discussed here: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=18413#87245

Here are some links for their project:
http://www.ose.org.nz/
http://eduforge.org/wiki/wiki/nzvle/wiki?pagename=NZOSVLE%20Project%20Summary

Hi,
Martin figures are quite old, have you realized the date?
Moodle scalability is a reality now. In addition to NZVLE cited by Mark, other quite big installations of Moodle (>10.000 students) in the Higher Education arena are:
California State University at Humboldt. You will see Michael Penney a lot in these forums. And they are doing a wonderful work on Lesson and Gradebook modules.
San Francisco State University. Jason Cole and his team are developing a new gradebook, and they devised the scripts I use to manage students and enrolments at my site.
At ULPGC (my site) we have 400 courses and 22.000 students in the system. Our plans are to migrate the whole University (2000 courses) to Moodle next year.

As you may see, Moodle is a serious option even for very large university campus.
I will add it is a better option than any propietary solution. Invest your money (if needed) in programmers and sysadmins: you will make the work of your sysadmins more creative, and you will be contributing to generation of knowledge, as a University should do.

- Enrique -

If you switch to Moodle, you can spend your license money on a new PHP programmer and start having a bit more fun at work.

Well, I"m not finding lots of answers here, so I'll add my question/scenario to the mix:

We've got 8000 active users - which seems to be the largest installation that BB can come up with (though we keep hearing rumors of others - never evidence). These are courses that were created to be either 100% online, or hybrids. Some may have limited use, but some are very active - big enough that they take 10 minutes per to copy. A vast number of these are two intro classes that everyone has to take, and of which we may offer 100-200 sections a semester. These have a total of about 35 items (assignments, quizzes, discussions, etc..) each. So the biggest load is several classes all taking a test at the same time on a given day.

Currently, BB running on 4 servers with 2 CPU's each against SQL Server has a miserable time. Facutly blames IT support, IT blames BB, BB admits some culpability, while faculty says "Such and such a school doesn't have this problem" and blames it again on IT support. IT support has rumors of rogue stored procedures that never stop on the DB, and there's intermittent talk about a DB license that uses all 4 CPU processes being enabled, then disabled to save $15000. So it's a mess.

I've put my courses on Moodle, and have been garnering support from ITS, from my director, the dean, various other teachers, TA's and programmers. Now the question is, can we handle that huge class. My wife has been hired to migrate all the contents to Moodle, and has done the basics - now for review and piloting this summer. There are some serious concerns about the gradebook that I'll post to the new gradebook forum (thanks Martin!!) and the obvious development work to batch enroll and such- but that''s easier than the gradebook I think.

So can ANYONE out there point to a good solid install where there are thousands of users, happy? I know a local college, Johnson C Smith Univeristy uses Moodle - so I'll need to touch base with them- but I think they only have 2000 students, and probably fewer online.

Our IT programmers imply that stress testing will be no big deal, and one just said, "if mySQL has trouble, we'll just switch to postGress..". I guess that sounds too easy.

So I'm open to idea, suggestions, etc.. My thought is to have my small program area do all courses this way (we are Internet Tech) as well as a few pilot users from other areas, and to work out the kinks in the process. I continue to push, evangelize, speak, etc.. to anyone who'll listen, and then one day we wake up and find BB's down to 3k users....

d.i.

Hi, Michael -

I've just (this weekend) begun a project to convert some 3,000 +/- high school courses from Blackboard to Moodle. I'm assured that the vast majority of these are little more than teachers' notes, but we'll see.

As a test run, we were given a batch of two dozen BB archive files, ranging in size from about 200Kb to nearly 50Mb. We had to recompile PHP to enable XSLT with Sablot, but then were able to upload all but one course without any further problem, except some of the image files seem to have gotten misfiled. The courses aren't terribly pretty (your rant explains why) but at least Moodle didn't choke on them.

I looked at the SF conversion tool - wondered whether you had any insight as to whether it might be useful with 1.52+ or is it specifically for 1.4x? (Don't know if it matters, but we're running 1.52+ against PostgreSQL, on Apache 2.0)

From what I've seen so far, it'll be necessary to massage these courses a bit cosmetically to take advantage of Moodle's lessons, assignments, etc. Wondered whether the SF tool might take some of the tedium out of that?

Anything we might be able to do to help with developing tools - testing, etc. - we'd be glad to do.

As a semi-personal aside - my erstwhile partner's daughter just matriculated at HSU this fall. Plans to study something involving wildlife, zoology, or some such thing. Do you happen to know off-hand whether your Moodle implementation supports courses in those general areas?

Lastly - think enough people are converting from BB to Moodle to justify a dedicated forum here? 

Anyway, thanks for the links to the tools!

WB