Applying Moodle on a large University

Applying Moodle on a large University

by Adam Oudaimah -
Number of replies: 14

I'm asked to build a LMS system for a university using Moodle.

The university is divided into several faculties, each faculty can be considered as an individual educational organization.

Each faculty has at least 1000 students.

Should each faculty has it is own Moodle, or can I use ONE Moodle for the university (for all faculties)?

Let's say that I am restricted to build ONE Moodle, What should I do at this case?

Is Moodle applicable at this case?

Does Moodle support a certain hierarchy for dividing the Moodle into small Moodles?

Thanks every one.

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In reply to Adam Oudaimah

Re: Applying Moodle on a large University

by O. Three -

You ask good questions, and although I don't have answers to them I do remember learning something on this course on Udemy that may possibly address all your concerns. You can find the course here: https://www.udemy.com/moodle-administration-tutorial/, and if you visit it now and then you might get a better deal on it. I think I got it for less than ten USD during a promotion of some sort, but it's advertised for $11.99 at the time of this post.


From what I recall, the instructor explained very well how to go about setting Moodle for large setups such as the one you described. I'm sorry I can't help with more than that, I sort of didn't pay much attention to that lesson because I was interested in the opposite (setting Moodle up for small study groups).

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In reply to Adam Oudaimah

Re: Applying Moodle on a large University

by Usman Asar -
Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
you can do both, depending on how well you can manage
doing separate moodle instances, you can easily separate them putting them on their own subdomains, their own departmental look, but then issue will be when you have some students taking courses in other departments , they will have to re-register themselves, essentially a new log-in for every sub moodle, unless they are being authenticated using LDAP server.
you can also, keep faculties on main page as courses and list all subjects within that course taught at that faculty, so a faculty being a course you can modify looks as well.
keeping one moodle will make it easier for you to manage.
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In reply to Adam Oudaimah

Re: Applying Moodle on a large University

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
Yes, there are the two paths you've described:
a) one Moodle with one top level course category per department
b) a multi-tenant capable Moodle.

a) would be the official Moodle from https://download.moodle.org/, b) a fork like IOMAD https://www.iomad.org/.
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Applying Moodle on a large University

by Adam Oudaimah -

Thanks a lot.
Is there any other forks despite IOMAD?

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In reply to Adam Oudaimah

Re: Applying Moodle on a large University

by C Behan -

Hi Adam,

Unless you really have to, just have one Moodle site with a category for each faculty.

It's much easier to administer and manage, avoids unnecessary duplication, and is easier for sharing resources, common pages etc.

Catherine


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In reply to Adam Oudaimah

Re: Applying Moodle on a large University

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
No, I don't know. What is the issue with IOMAD?
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Applying Moodle on a large University

by Adam Oudaimah -

I'm trying it right now, It seems to be the solution to my problem.
If it doesn't work I will notify you, thanks a lot for your help

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In reply to Adam Oudaimah

Re: Applying Moodle on a large University

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
Oh, no! I am not responsible at all. I just had a quick look once. But the developer is a regular in these forums.
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In reply to Adam Oudaimah

Re: Applying Moodle on a large University

by m question -
I know you didn't ask about this, but if you need groups in the same course

then you must handle it manually (uploading file) in each course

Moodle does not provide automatic way for that.


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In reply to Adam Oudaimah

Re: Applying Moodle on a large University

by Joost Elshoff -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers

Hi Adam,

An interesting question with a lot of interesting answers as well. I've seen both multitenant and big single Moodle implementations in universities I've worked with.

There are a lot things to consider before deciding in favor of one or the other:

  • How's your organization's application administration set up?
  • Do you want to host on-premise or in the cloud?
  • Does Moodle have to be set up to interface with a Student Information System, an Identity Provider or external authentication platform?
  • Does every department need a specific configuration, or is most of this covered in one general config?
  • Do you need to interface with tools like TurnItIn or similar for plagiarism detection?
  • ...

Setting up connectionsfor multiple Moodles to a SIS, to authentication, to an IDP or an external service like TurnItIn may not always be possible and will most definitely increase your workload in configuration and troubleshooting. 

In that sense, it seems logical to set up one big cloud-hosted Moodle with enough hardware capacity to cater the needs of the entire uni. 

Also, consider this for a multitenant set up:

What happens when a student in department 1 (Moodle 1) wishes to take electives from department 2 (Moodle 2) and department 4 (Moodle 4)? He/she won't have a central dashboard outlining all of his/her course details, but 3 or more. He/she may have SSO access to all Moodles, but has to manage his/her dashboards from different URLs.

In the last few years, I've seen various successful Moodle implementations in academic / higher education with well over 15k users running smoothly.

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In reply to Joost Elshoff

Re: Applying Moodle on a large University

by Adam Oudaimah -

Thanks a lot for your help.

I've developed a Moodle before but of one faculty, it was the Information Engineering faculty at my university, now they want to apply it on the whole university.

The first problem is:

I think the university (Tishreen University) has about 50k students, and I'm afraid that Moodle won't handle this number of students.

The second problem:

Each faculty has its own organizational hierarchy, and a student from one faculty cannot see or has any action with the other faculties.

I've seen such multitenant called IOMAD, can you please tell me if it is a good solution.

I think it would be after some modifications, but I've been told that IOMAD lacks documentation and buggy!!!!

I appreciate your help a lot

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In reply to Adam Oudaimah

Re: Applying Moodle on a large University

by Floyd Saner -

Adam,

RE: Your first problem.   Moodle can easily handle 50K students. The issue is not Moodle, it is the capacity and configuration of your web and database servers.  There are quite a few sites with over 100K users, see https://moodle.net/stats/  and https://www.moodlenews.com/2017/lets-dispel-the-notion-once-and-for-all-that-moodle-is-not-scalable/

Floyd

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In reply to Adam Oudaimah

Re: Applying Moodle on a large University

by Floyd Saner -

Adam,

The way I configure Moodle for multiple divisions in an organization is to create separate course categories. Each category can have its own theme and front page. I then assign Managers to each category. It is not true multi-tenancy, but does work fairly well if you do not need to totally isolate access among the various divisions. 

Totara is a Moodle fork that handles multi-tenancy and hierarchical admin roles very well.

Also, Moodle just announced Moodle Workplace that is due to be released mid 2019.  This version will have many of the features currently in Totara.

IOMAD provides a basic multi-tenant / hierarchical structure on top of Moodle. It is very easy to add to or remove from current Moodle sites. The main problems I've encountered with IOMAD are a lack of documentation and code that can be a bit buggy. There is a GitHub repository for reporting bugs and tracking issues.

Floyd

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