Hi,
At San Francisco State University, we are looking for Blackboard alternatives. Moodle looks great in the features area, much more mature than anything else out there. The community here seems incredible as well.
I've noticed that a lot of the universities using the system right now are a lot smaller than we are. We have about 30k students, and about 2k instructors. Our current BB system is averaging about 100k hits per day right now.
I was wondering if anyone else was running a very large university with moodle. We can throw a lot of hardware at this if we decide to migrate (I'm looking at multiple front end machines, load balanced all pointing to a ridiculously large database machine behind them). We'll also develop a BB migration tool (it's just XML after all) to share. But if I can find someone who has taken this big, it will be a much easier sell.
Thanks in advance.
Jason
Here at the University of York we also need to decide on which VLE to use university wide. I too would therefore like to know of experiences at other universities.
We have had a very good experience at the Department of Mathematics where Moodle is running on a PC and hits at a rate of 2000 page requests/hour at busy times do not slow it down perceptibly. But this is with only 500 students.
There are of course two possible routes for going university-wide:
- One server per department
- One cluster for the whole university
I think the first option is actually much better because then each department is still free to modify their copy of Moodle on their server to suit their requirements. Here in the maths department for example we have extended our Moodle to automatically generate randomized problem sheets for our students and to mark them automatically. This system would not be useful for a literature department for example.
Human resources might be a greater problem than considerations of server speed. If each department has its own installation, then someone would have to be in charge of each one. There is great potential here for an individual who is only partially-competent to muck things up and inconvenience an entire faculty. It might be better for a few knowledgable people to be in charge of a single implementation, which might cloned over multiple servers so that when an upgrade comes along the local modifications can be restored in a uniform manner.
Additional functionality can exist even though it might not be used, but randomized problem sheets, for example, might be equally useful for physics or even language learning.
Additional functionality can exist even though it might not be used, but randomized problem sheets, for example, might be equally useful for physics or even language learning.
Hi Jason,
can you update us on whether San Francisco State University is planning to go ahead with the move to Moodle? It would help us at the University of York to decide if we should follow suit.