Questions to ask BEFORE deciding upon Moodle

Questions to ask BEFORE deciding upon Moodle

by Paul Ganderton -
Number of replies: 5

I'd appreciate your help here. A colleague has asked if I can make a checklist that she could use to gather information before deciding on whether to use Moodle in her school. For example, do they have enough tech support? servers? tech-savvy staff?

These would be the questions you'd hopefully ask before you go ahead!

Ideally, I'd like not only to make a checklist but add commentary to each point suggesting why it's a good idea to ask this question and with supporting documentation/examples.

It's a big task. I've done all the usual searching through Moodle/Google etc. even emailled a Moodle admin but no response so far. Is ther anything you've run into that could help?

Promise i'll post the results!

Thanks.

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In reply to Paul Ganderton

Re: Questions to ask BEFORE deciding upon Moodle

by Frankie Kam -
Picture of Plugin developers

Some pertinent Questions to ask:

1. Will you be hosting the Moodle server on your own server, or by using a Web hosting company?

2. Should you go for Linux or Windows-based servers?

3. Is there someone in the college already smitten and won-over to Moodle who can act as an evangelist to get other academic staff to use Moodle?

4. How many users at any one time is predicted to use the system (e.g., in an online test, how many concurrent users)?

5. Have you considered other cloud-based, free alternatives (of which there are several like Instructure's Canvas and Haiku)?

6. Do you have technical staff who are well-versed with Server installations, optimisations and techie stuff like balancers and cache stuff.

7. How over-worker are the teaching staff at the school?

8. Are the teaching staff already using Web 2.0, like Youtube.com, in their classes ?

9. Have you made a list of the pros and cons of using Moodle?

10. Have you surfed over to http://moodurian.blogspot.com to get a feel of what Moodle can be used for in an academic setting?
big grin

Glad to help out,
Frankie Kam
Moodler since 2008
Lecturer and Moodle administrator
Melaka, Malaysia

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In reply to Paul Ganderton

Re: Questions to ask BEFORE deciding upon Moodle

by Russell Waldron -

I think the non-technical questions come first. 

1. What are the most pressing worries (costs, risks or frustrations) of (a) the executive, (b) influential students, and (c) disadvantaged students? Moodle can reduce timelines and workload, and can expand communication and continuity, in many ways. Rather than trying to implement everything that Moodle can do, start with one problem as a pilot study.

2. How are educational outcomes currently measured? Pick the most frequent measurement and consider how the activity including associated administration and reporting could be streamlined on Moodle. Expect to reduce administrative workload and timelines and to gain convenience, simplicity, and transparency. 

3. Is there provision for tech and pedagogical support to change as needs emerge? (see Integrated Technology Adoption and Diffusion Model, Sherry 1999)

4. Is there an adequate alternative already in place? It's sensible to be gracious about using it, and to become a useul informant for the support staff, because you'll want their support in the future.

5. Do any existing policies (Privacy or Protection or Security or Purchasing) bar you from signing students up to an independent server? If so, you need to get busy on charming the school's IT service providers.

The technical questions have 'it depends' answers, but can can be resolved more easily.

Regards, 

Russell

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In reply to Russell Waldron

Re: Questions to ask BEFORE deciding upon Moodle

by Russell Waldron -

Technical implementation issues.

1. Ensure that students have sufficient device-access for your purpose. 

  • An occasional class visit to a lab of computers is enough if your purpose is just to test their knowledge (say, in a Quiz).
  • At the other extreme, if your aim is to launch sustained, creative, social learning that continues when the teacher is not present, 24x7 connected-everywhere 1:1 portable computers are desirable.
  • A 'device' needs a network connection that is considered 'fast enough' by users, and doesn't drop out for more than fraction of a minute at a time.
  • Most activities on Moodle are designed for real keyboard, and 800x600 pixel or larger screen.
2. Ensure that teachers have adequate device-access for their purposes.
  • Teachers need a suitable device constantly to hand. 
  • Teachers need network access to their Moodle spaces in every place that they work, including (for most) their home. Check firewall configuration. LDAP authentication will probably be involved.
  • Teachers need full-time access to a 'sandpit' out of sight of students, in which to practice and explore and adapt to Moodle, and experiment without fear of censure. 
3. Decide on a plan for handling alumni. This has implications for course naming scheme, enrolment methods, participant privacy, server capacity and backup schedule.
  • After finishing a course, learners might benefit from continued access to course material, their grades, their assignments, records of discussion, and forums shared with other learners. Will you unenrol the Class of 2011, or will you keep the Class of 2011 as a distinct cohort in the same course as Class of 2012 while you update the content, or will you keep Class of 2011 in their own course and import just the materials and activity structure into a new course for the Class of 2012? This depends on your attitude to intellectual property and your attitude to long-term relations between staff and alumni and younger children. You should begin as you mean to go on.
  • If you accumulate data from year to year, the server needs to be sized and upgraded accordingly. Each 'full backup' will become larger (slower).
4. Plan to minimise the disruption due to server maintenance and restoration after accidents. 
  • The impact of a service interruption (e.g. wage-value of minutes of human time that would be lost in discovering and adapting to the outage) is a rational basis for determining appropriate preventative maintenance and support arrangements.  
  • Scheduled maintenance (a shut-down per term for the installation of planned patches and updates) is lower stress and less costly than urgent arisings. If you can't tolerate interruptions in service, it is cost-effective to use a host (such as a Moodle Partner) with fail-over capability.
  • The support contract will come to an end or the technician will die, and continuity will depend on how well prepared the successor is. 
5. Ensure the network can handle the traffic.
  • If a high number students must be able to download/upload a file at the same minute, their location and type of network connections are relevant, and the network switch throughput inside the school may be limiting, just as it would be for filesharing and email.
  • If you can set assignment deadlines to fall in normal school hours, most of the file uploads will be done from school, using your internal network (faster than internet connections). Also, any technical problems can be discussed face-to-face without disrupting someone's sleep cycle.
  • If many students must view some large files (video etc), put the media on the same side of your gateway as the users. If the media is for home use, put it onto an external host. If the media is for classroom use, stream it from a server within the school. If both scenarios are important, post the media in both places.  
  • You will need to warn students that they need to upload assignments well ahead of deadlines (at least several minutes). Uploads may be slowed when many upload simultaneously.
6. Ask for a service that can handle the expected load.
  • Estimate how many pages will be viewed and how many posts or uploads will be submitted per second, and how many video or audio streams will come directly from the server. Then get technical advice on the server configuration. Your requirements should inform technical decisions, not the other way around. Teachers can delegate (to the IT department or service provider) decisions on technical details such as operating system (usually Linux or Windows), database (usually MySQL or PostGres), virtualisation (common), hardware configuration, backup systems, monitoring, physical location, power and environment provisions, warranty and service level agreements. 
  • In the past some modules (notoriously, one form of text chat) put a surprisingly heavy load on the server. Search the Using Moodle discussions if concerned.
  • When you see a large volume of content building up, add a repository (such as Alfresco). Don't tackle that project too early, because the decisions deserve careful consideration.
7. Plan for retirement.
  • Moodle, more than most software, makes it easy to move content and records to another server. However, much of the user data are pretty incomprehensible to humans when not mounted in Moodle. Consider whether your school should keep a copy of your Moodle server in a virtual machine in perpetuity, ready to provide evidence of fulfilment or compliance with the school's duty. 
  • If your school adopts an LMS Standardisation policy, you might need to move your content to their system. It is usually trivially easy to move whole courses from one Moodle to another. However, you should consider the risk that some other product will be chosen. Some objects (files, folders, links, SCORM objects) can be loaded into other learning management systems, but at present that usually ends up being a tedious, one-by-one process.
  • Consider also whether past data can/should be reliably routinely purged, to reduce the potential burden of discovery in future legal scenarios.
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In reply to Paul Ganderton

Re: Questions to ask BEFORE deciding upon Moodle

by Russell Waldron -

Do you know about the book?  http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/Using_Moodle_book (free online)

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In reply to Russell Waldron

Re: Questions to ask BEFORE deciding upon Moodle

by Paul Ganderton -

Russell and Frankie, thank you so much for all the effort you put into your replies - by far the best I've had so far.

I agree with you, it's no good just sticking Moodle in and hoping for the best - it needs to be thought through first.

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