Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Guy Flaherty -
Number of replies: 19
Hi all.

Over the last 6 months we have been testing Moodle for use in our school (about 3000 users) along with just about all the other LMS systems you can imagine. As part of the process the school even contracted a consultant to make a recommendation about which software should be chosen (there has been some fighting over BB/StudyWiz/Moodle between departments).

Our IT staff and managers here are keen to go with Moodle but one of the major arguments against it that the 'opposition' are using is that it will take so much time/resources to manage/admin and that a dedicated staff member is needed just for Moodle.

I would appreciate any help or suggestions or just plain information about the community's experience with regards to this area. How long does it take to get Moodle up and running? How much time do you need to spend daily/weekly/in general to keep Moodle running smoothly? If you do any tweaks/development of you own installation, how hard would you rate this to do? Is it relatively straightforward to add stuff to the default Moodle install? Did you need to hire an admin for Moodle? If you have 150+ teachers using your install, how hard is this to manage and do you have any suggestions for us?

Any help or information you could provide us would be greatly appreciated smile

Thanks,
Guy
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In reply to Guy Flaherty

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Michael Penney -

Hi Guy, you need about the same amount of work to manage a Moodle install as a Blackboard install, and the same hardware requirements will be fine. It takes about 5-10 min. to set up Moodle, for 3000 users you shouldn't need to do any tweaking/tuning, just get a decent dual proc. box with 2GB+ of RAM (more RAM is always nicesmile. We have >14000 (about 4000 active) on a dual 2.8, 3Gb, running RedHat Enterprise.

Administering the server is pretty much the same between our BB basic install and our Moodle install, keep it turned on and updated, we have to kill a runaway java process on the BB server once and a while.

Now if you want to get good use of any LMS, you are best off planning to have one FTE/3000 users (2/3000 is better), but that is mostly going to be in training, course building, blended or online pedagogy, not system admin.

Adding custom code is more complex, it isn't too hard to do, but it is a good idea to test anything new you install first, and of course that takes time. Were you planning on making building blocks for Blackboard? Just because you can tweak Moodle doesn't me you don't have tosmile (if your staff resources are limited I'd recommend outsourcing custom development).

Regarding 150 teachers, how long it takes depends on your set up, if you have LDAP set up to do authorization, then course setup and enrollment is automatic. If you are going to get Blackboard Basic, you are going to have to set up courses and enroll students manually, Moodle offers a number of ways in addition to LDAP to automate this process.

Are you using a student info. system? If it doesn't support LDAP or if setting up LDAP is too much work, then flat file enrollment is a common method, your MIS/SIS exports a flat file with course and student info. on a set time scale and then you set Moodle to load it, again on a set time scale (with a cron job). This automates the whole process of course setup and enrollment, much more expensive to do this with Blackboard. There is more info. in the enrollments/flat file section of your Moodle admin settings. Also see external database.

If you don't have an SIS or it isn't capable of exporting or connecting via the web, then of course teachers can set up courses and manage enrollment themselves or you can do it manually, which you'll have to do with Blackboard. I'm not fammiliar with StudyWiz, but I'd guess it is going to be similar: either your student information system can export data or it can't, regardless of LMS product if it can't then you are going to be doing enrollment manually, and if it can then you can automate it with Moodle (which you'll have to get at least BB ASP to do with Blackboard).

I'm curious, what data are the 'competition' basing their staff requirements on? Have they given you a FTE number for Blackboard, if so what version (Basic, ASP, Enterprise?) and at what price?

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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Guy Flaherty -
Michael, thanks very much for this information. I have often read your posts here on the forums and I have been greatful in an anonymous way for all the time you put into helping people.

To answer a few of your questions, we have a staff of 8 in the IT department. We run Novell for our ldap and other services and we have a whole host of systems running with various stuff configured. We have no problem getting our student/class/teacher info out of these and into Moodle if we get the chance to use it. We even managed to get single sign on going on a test install of Moodle very easily (running through our iChain proxy setup). The SIS system we have here is pretty antiquated but we have plenty of experience working around it's problems and querks.

We understand about the person needed to build courses/training etc, but we are being told that moodle is difficult/time consuming to admin. We (IT staff), can't understand why this would be any different to any other system, but I have been asked to check with the moodle community about this.

I do not have any information about staffing required for a BB install, but it would not be the basic version if we went with them anyway. As far as I know the pricing is standard pricing for an install in a school in Australia, so about the usual stuff.

The consultant reported that after considering the 5 LMS systems specified, Moodle would not suit the school as it would be too difficult to maintain/admin. Also the teachers here are not always keen on open source, as they can be quite demanding of IT, so they seem to think that Moodle would require a lot of admin/development time to get it set up satisfactorily for the school.

My boss has asked that I find out information specific to the day to day running and maintaining of the system as a priority. So I really appreciate you taking the time to help me out. I realise this depends a lot on individual circumstance, but I was just hoping to hear how other people are doing.

Thanks for your time.
Guy
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In reply to Guy Flaherty

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Michael Penney -

Hmm, can't imagine the consultant was comparing Moodle with course setup/enrollment managed via LDAP, flat file, or external database. With these options, admin is pretty low maintenance. Perhaps the consultant evaluated it as if manual enrollment/course set up was the only option?

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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Michael Cox -
My parents always taught me that if you want to know the outcome of a survey, find out who is funding it.  I apply the same concept to consultants; find out what their background is in and overlay that on their recommendation.  Case in point, two or so years ago we (the internal IT) recommended a certain solution for a project's web page.  A highly paid consultant came in and recommended (and subsequently programmed) a different kind of interface.  Now, two years and countless dollars later, the same consultant is recommending the solution we proposed two years ago.  My point in this is that we are (more widely) applying this to future decisions of whether to hire internal or go to consultants.  About two years ago we hosted our own Bb (5.x) server for a year but the decision was made to go ASP (good salesmanship on the part of Bb).  While we hosted it we were able to perform certain tasks that they now have to pay for.  With that said and getting more to the point of the post, we are looking at Moodle for another project.  The original project using Bb had the mind set that "you have to spend money to make money", thankfully the current project is more educationally founded.  Yes you have to spend money for education but where you spend it counts a great deal.  This project is willing to spend it on internal resources.  Part of the rational is that we are providing jobs to the local community.  This in turn, using open source, will give back to the larger community as well.  I don't mean to get up on a soap box but my background is in the private industry (which Bb is); I was employed in several functions from direct support to ASP to consultant; I am not an educator, I am an IT person; but I love education.  I get paid less than the private industry but I love the fact that we, as a community, can get together and work on this together without having to pay an annual contract or hourly fee other than what our organizations already pay for our salaries.  I don't post things very often so I hope I haven't violated any net-etiquette.
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In reply to Michael Cox

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Guy Flaherty -
Just for your information, the consultant's background is in WebCT, but she seems to have moved away from this product completely. The lady was a teacher and has an experienced and well thought of background in getting schools using learning management software. She seemed like a good person to ask for an independent viewpoint to us. She has no relationship with any product vendor, and will not be involved in the implementation of whatever solution we decide to implement. We had a chance to question her last night actually, and her recommendation seemed to be based on what she honestly felt would best fit our school and our needs. Seemed fair smile

You make a good point about Open Source and commercial software and we completely understand what you are saying with regards to internal Vs out sourced systems, as we have similar choices here. At the moment, we have a very strong push to keep things in-house, except it seems, for a learning management system!

Thanks for your advice and info and I certainly am not feeling violated big grin
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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Guy Flaherty -
Actually, I don't think she really was sure about how the school would manage this area. She seemed to be more focused on the teacher and student use of the system then the admin. I have the feeling she was perhaps 'sold' the idea that every system needs maintenance of some kind, and with Moodle this needs to be done in house. She did explain that from all the school users of Moodle she had talked to, most of them around our location were teachers who had the responsibility for the system added to their duties with little time allocated. Meaning that most of these people spent a large amount of their own personal time working with Moodle. Her point was that often the software became a passion for these people and therefore there is a lot of 'unrecorded' or unrecognised time that needs to be put into managing Moodle. If the software is managed by the vendor, this time is reduced to nearly nothing it would appear. I will wait and see on that one though smile She was quite honest and open and I don't think she was just going with a line from a vendor or anything like that, which is why I was asked to try and get some feedback from the community regarding this area.

Thanks for your input Michael. Guy
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In reply to Guy Flaherty

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Michael Penney -

Think I see the problem with the data here:

were teachers who had the responsibility for the system added to their duties with little time allocated.

Did she talk to teachers who set up their own WebCT/Blackboard server and administered it themselves to compare the time spent on administration?

Seems to me that the fact that busy teachers could set up their own LMS and administer it themselves would point out the opposit of her conclusions: it must be relatively easy to admin. IMO, setting up your own Blackboard server and administering it while teaching a full load would be more an act of fanaticism than lovesmile.

It seems sort of like concluding that Toyotas are harder to maintain than Fords by talking only to folks who work on their own Toyotas while talking only to Ford owners who take their cars to the dealer to get it fixed.

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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Michael Cox -
Again, I'm not sure where in the lineage of replies this will show up, but in response to  Michael Penney's 11/06/2005 response, It is in the line of my last response that teachers may be more involved by personal love in moodle than some sort of institutional requirement of Bb/WebCt.
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In reply to Michael Cox

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Guy Flaherty -
Without a doubt many people love working with Moodle and that is why they set it up and run it in their schools. However, this argument can be used against Moodle in some ways. First, it means that in order for it to work, someone has to 'love' Moodle in order to get it to work well for the school. Secondly, it is likely that if this is a personal 'crusade' of a teacher, what will happen if the teacher moves on from the school. Someone will have to inherit their 'passion' along with their position! This was often brought up by teachers here who do not seem to be comfortable with Open Source or 'Free' software. Instead of having this risk with a system, why not just pay a company for the responsibility of managing the solution???? So they say anyway smile
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In reply to Guy Flaherty

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
...absolutely no different from somebody buying a commercial package and being the 'expert'. Spreading the risk and ensuring that you have adequate backup (and I mean staff) here is a requirement of *any* system. If this cannot be acheived withing the institution then perhaps paying for the services of a Moodle partner may be an answer. This is another example of the flexibility of open source in general and Moodle in particular - you can have it in a way that suits *you* not the vendor.
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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Martín Langhoff -

Exacto!

If that happens with a proprietary system, you can't shop around for support: you're in the hands of a monopoly. With Moodle, you can get support from any of the many Moodle Partners if you want the seal of approval and to know that you are supporting further Moodle development, or from an independent Moodle developer or skillful geek.

You have options. Surely beats not having them... smile

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In reply to Guy Flaherty

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
> First, it means that in order for it to work, someone has to 'love' Moodle in order to get it to work well for the school. Secondly, it is likely that if this is a personal 'crusade' of a teacher, what will happen if the teacher moves on from the school.

This is the first time, I've heard the said argument. It sounds convincing - at least on first impression. Once I started thinking of what really happens, the flaw is obvious.

You don't compare the kicks of a push bicycle with a sports car. The crusaders push their wagons investing raw muscle power, the sports cars run on crude oil, and that costs a bit more!

In German we say "wenn billig, dann dreck billig" (if cheap then dirty cheap). So the problem is not with the crude oil but with those crusaders!

There was a time when we (Linux community) offered local schools IT services like maintainig servers (mostly web or e-mail) _free_, provided that we use Linux. Imagine, we were under pressure to prove customer satisfaction, the school staff always had the trump card in their sleeves, "things should run without we have to think even, otherwise we'll give it to Mac or Win or whatever" sad

Those times are gone. Opensource have matured. People will use it for its merit!
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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Guy Flaherty -
I think you are right here Michael, except for the fact that she does know how hard it is to setup/run BB and WebCT. This is why I think she recommended going with StudyWiz, as their solution would remove most of this work from us onto them. It remains to be seen how well this will work!
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In reply to Guy Flaherty

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Michael Cox -
I appreciate your acceptance of my comments and your response about the consultant.  My response is that, yes "every system needs maintenance" but are you willing to pay someone else for this maintenance at every turn or do you want to pay a local employee for this?  The time allocated by teachers with a passion for this being added to this is the keyword "passion".  It's been my experience that teachers are more likely to have a "passion" for something that they have an investment in.  The open source community better provides this than some commercial avenue.  My point here is that the teachers, in an open source community, get to truly express themselves.  Back to my history of the private industry, the dollar drives the outcome.  That's what I love about open source; the contributors (teachers in this case) can contribute and receive from a global community without financial penalty.  With all of that said, I can understand governmental concerns of financial transactions.  But, in the age-old question, where do we draw the lines of education and politics?
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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Michael Cox -
I'm not sure where this reply will show up in lineage of responses so I will preface this with a response to  Michael Penney' s response 11/3/05.  I don't know if Bb even offers self hosted anymore; I think they've gone they way of ASP only.  With that said, we had problems with Bb integrating to a self hosted LDAP schema even though we hosted Bb about a year ago.  Since it seems that they've gone to an ASP only solution, I doubt that they are willing to integrate to an onsite LDAP auth system.  Which lead me to the moodle solution of being able to combine your own LMS with your existing LDAP.
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In reply to Michael Cox

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Guy Flaherty -
We really liked the way we could get Moodle to integrate with our existing setup in terms of LDAP and proxies. That was definitely one of the points in favour of going with an Open Source and well built solution like Moodle. Up until now we have preferred to host all our own systems and run them ourselves, unfortunately this appears to now be going to change sad We will just have to see how that goes.
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In reply to Guy Flaherty

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
As already pointed out by other posters, the work involved and the ressources needed are comparable to any other competitive product, on first approximation. I personally find, Moodle _very_ easy to install and maintain, admittedly for a "small" site - 1500 fairly active users. (What did you expect to hear in this list? smile)

Since you have 8 IT professionls and studied LMS for 6 months, I don't know what I can add to that. Since the discussion is about maintenance work, let's look at it this way.

The roles people have to play:
- system administrator: person who setup the server, do all installations, upgrades, adding and removing Moodle-modules, looking after the database, doing backups, trouble-shooting, monitoring, profiling and benchmarking. In the Unix world the "root".

- (Moodle)plattform administrator: (Moodle) user authentication, adding and removing new courses, maintaining the main page of Moodle, informing the users about upcoming changes, down times,
problems happened, ets. This is the "admin" user inside Moodle.

- The "teachers": Who add content, keep the interation with the students, asking admin for more smile

You must be able to map your people to one or more such roles and guess what and how much each person will inverst, perhaps on a semester basis.

In case you don't have the ressource, you could consider outsourcing the first two roles.

Looking at your coordinates (Melbourne) I think you've more reasons to use Moodle smile)
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Guy Flaherty -
I appreciate your advice and time. We understand that the people and the way the software is implemented are very important factors to consider when trying to successfully implement a system such as Moodle. My boss is trying to pin me down with questions like 'Just how much time will we need to allocate to running Moodle each day/week?' and I am pretty much answering, 'It depends!'. So all the information people are providing is valuable. I feel like a reporter trying to find some 'quantifiable' data to use in a story or something smile

Thanks,
Guy
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In reply to Guy Flaherty

Re: Request for information about Managing a Moodle Installation

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
To be honest we find that it is not Moodle per se that keeps our support people busy it is stuff related to that. Suddenly all the people whose LDAP passwords are lost and/or expired come out of the woodwork.... Basically what I am saying is to make sure that the infrastructure that Moodle sits on is solid before you put more strain on it.
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