There appears to be no unique formula for working out the requirements for running Moodle. I suspect there are just too many variables for this to be an exact science. However, it is clear that a shared environment appears to be not much more than a stepping stone to a dedicated server, when the whole school/institution becomes involved. For many schools I suspect that this is just cloud-cuckooland at the moment, and it has nothing to do with Moodle, but more to do with a paradigm shift in the way that many teachers need to adapt to incorporate Moodle in their everyday 'teaching'.

If the whole instiutution/school has a real  'let's go for it' ethos, then Martin offers a great package, plus support. If you are still at the stage where one of two teachers are trying to change the world, then take time to evaluate Moodle on a smaller scale first, and introduce other users to the natural wonders of Moodle. After all, saving Moodle courses should not present a major hurdle, if you decide to upgrade to a dedicated server option.

Hi,

we are a school in austria www.eurogym.eduhi.at and i `ve got a new dual xeon intel (5300) server last week. We are working in a pilot project for elearning from the austrian government. Since the last 2 years we are working with Blackboard on central server in vienna. Our experience is, that a central server is useful for learning-projects over borders. In production with teachers and pupils at ordinary skills, you have often the problem that they have big files. To keep the frustration level low a high bandwith in the school is useful. Also to bind on LDAP keeps the administration level low. We prefer a schoolinternal solution. For external work with other schools we are wishing a form of moodle which is integrating moodle plattforms on  different servers. Explanation: each school is working on the own server. For big projects on central server the connections to the schoolservers is possible. So on the central server exists a database where the schooladmins can logon their schoolmoodle. The pupils logon on the schoolmoodle, if necessary i can connect to other schools easily, without creating new accounts on other moodleinstallations.

High perfomance hardware exists. We dont have the software. I am the elearning coordinator on our school, i have studied biology, i couldn`t do this. I have ideas. If someone can do this work, please tell me. Our ministery has money for such work, i know some important people.

For interested ones:

in austria a project of 30 schools are developing end evaluation sequences for elearning platforms. In may 2005 we have to decide which platform we are working with in the next years. My favorite is moodle. Generally we are watching and discussing support here in this forums.