Moodle Update

[thomashenryboehm]

Our college's Moodle underwent an update over the weekend. This is CBBC Career College in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. Anyway, all submitted assignments got lost in the process. Most of us had uploaded files, but a couple students had typed their assignments in the Moodle word processor. Anyway, the one student that I study with was one of the ones that lost her assignments. She has proof that she submitted the assignments, but was told that she will have to do them over and resubmit. She was told that the upgrade was a Moodle update and had nothing to do with the college, and so that the college is not responsible for the loss. Does anyone have any idea what the protocol would be here? What would be done at other colleges? She is ready to drop out of our program over it, and I hate to see her do it. I'm just curious, was this a system wide Moodle update, or was it a Moodle update that was performed by the college? Is there any way to find out?

Thank you to anyone that can answer this question for me.

thom boehm

[3s-gtech]

I haven’t used Moodle for a while as an admin, but effectively I was always responsible for any updates, and that meant database backups before updating (which I did, as it could break spectacularly).

 

If the college hosts Moodle themselves, they are responsible for it.

 

If it’s hosted by a provider, the college will still have a responsibility to ensure it’s being backed up, but the update may have been scripted to happen.

 

So - no, not good enough, and they need to at least try to recover it (which is hard, IIRC). Lesson to learn - never submit the only copy of any work!

[NeoNebula]

Oh! Gosh! I can imagine how stressed students are now because of this fact.But, as far as I know, most colleges and universities have protocols for backing up data before performing significant system updates. My point is that it's worth inquiring if there's a backup that could be used to recover the lost assignments. It's unusual for all data to be lost during such updates, as proper IT practices involve backing up data to prevent such scenarios. If you need more details, you can check out here: https://docs.moodle.org/403/en/Upgrading#Backup_important_data

[Rob_D]

As intimated by the other replies, I think you need to speak to your collage's IT Support team. They'll be better placed to answer your questions than us, and I'm sure they'd be able to do something to help.

[jthompson]

This was back in April.

[NeoNebula]

April is always the hottest month for assignments and paper submissions. Many students just do everything at the last moment, which makes the system crash. It's like dealing with the same problem again and again. I wonder why your school's admins decided to update Moodle in April. Why wouldn't they do it during the summer break and test it?