Getting a working VLE

[interele]

Has anyone got a VLE running big time? With all staff contributing and loads of teaching material on board etc etc. If so how long did it take and did you have to get someone in to do it or did you manage to persuade the teachers to contribute

 

Ta

[FN-GM]

I think geoff has a big Moodle VLE going.

[Antp]

Hey,

i would say ours is quite large (albeit ugly) its vle.olchs.lancs.sch.uk nobody did anything for the first month or so, but then one of the teachers took to it and now all the other teachers go through her.

[Antp]

And lancsngfl set it up for us, which i would not recomend.

[zag]

Use sharepoint and moodle here. The way we got people using it was to totally remove the teacher and student shared drives and just told people to start uploading files to the VLE instead.

 

Of course we kept the shared drives around, just not seen by the users any more.

[interele]

We have about 3TB of data in our shared areas.

When we had Moodle that might have worked but

we now have Fronter it isn't so friendly.

[zag]

We have about 3TB of data in our shared areas.

When we had Moodle that might have worked but

we now have Fronter it isn't so friendly.

 

Thats the beauty of the process though When you move its a great way of discarding old data and only bringing over the relevant stuff.

 

Our shares went from 30gb to about 2gb overnight.

[imullings]

Hi

Where are you?

We have gone from nothing (Well our old intranet) to our VLE (Moodle) being the centre of a lot of teaching and learning in school. Even our resent OFSTED inspection picked it up.

Most of the success is not down to the platform you use (With a few exceptions), training and support count for a lot.

We are in Wiltshire and you are welcome to come and have a look if you like.

 

Ian Mullings

Devizes School IT Support

[Zimmer]

We are currently phasing out a purchased VLE solution from a company called Technical (who I would not recommend by the way!) to the more popular Moodle platform.

 

We are also using Sharepoint for the Staff Intranet at the moment, which seems to be gaining a lot of popularity since we introduced it last summer.

 

In terms of usage the current VLE is heavily used by students right from day one of their courses, all our screening tests are hosted through the VLE and most course material is accessible via the VLE. With Moodle slowly being eased into the wild we are hoping that all the content will be moved over and actually being used by staff and students before the end of the Christmas holidays, we currently have around 2TB of data to migrate.

[interele]

Ian, How long did it take - how many man/hours and how many people were/are involved

 

Ta

[imullings]

From me starting to play with Moodle to changing the school home page, it was about a year.

We set up a test server that we and a few teachers/pupils could play with (You will need this time).

We had about 500 users that had used it before we went whole school.

We set it as the home page in September 2007.

It has steady grown since then.

 

As far as man hours are concerned, I personally have spent hundreds on the project. Mostly because we had a clear vision of what we wanted and Moodle did not tick all the boxes as a standard install. We also host it ourselves (This gives us true single sign on) but getting it to word quickly and reliably with 300+ concurrent users was a challenge.

The other big time consumer is training and support. We give our editing users an introductory session of about 30 Minutes training. This can be one to one or during an organised session.

After completing this we then give them editing rights to their subject course area.

We also do more advanced courses on a one to one or department basis. All of this takes time and getting the SLT on board is very important. Our teachers can do this on TD days and part of their CPD.

 

As for people involved this grows as the project develops. Starting with a clear vision that the SLT are behind and is clearly set out is important. Seeing other school setups and different types of software is very helpful.

As an example we went for Moodle because -

We could change and customise it ourselves.

It does single sign on (In school it auto logs you in)

It is easy to setup/edit courses and content.

 

We made the decision that the above where of higher priority than linking to our MIS (SIMS).

 

Hope this helps

 

You can see the login page at - http://intranet.devizes.wilts.sch.uk/

 

Ian Mullings

Devizes School IT Support

[Zimmer]

How are you finding response time with 300+ concurrent users? What hardware are you hosting Moodle on? Also, is it on a Linux box or have you gone down the XAMPP route?

 

We have chosen to go Windows with a XAMPP install, and it's also running in a virtual environment. We are currently thinking of moving Moodle to dedicated hardware as we feel that performance isn't to great!

[imullings]

We have a dedicated server 3Gig Xeon with 4 Gig of ram. We use server 2003 IIS as we have a lot of ASP code we use like our booking system Booking System Web Site.

 

It took a lot of work but I found APC PHP accelerator worked best for us on windows. There are a lot of other ones available. You will need to have some large disks as we have 86GB of data (With course backups) already.

This setup works well but when we have lots of users watching video or submitting a feedback it does slow down a bit (up to 5s to load a page). Normally it is very good.

 

Ian Mullings

[tim.dalton]

Thought I'd add a contribution here.

 

We've got a pretty large scale Moodle site up and running- 1800 students, 200 staff that's heavily used. Has been in place for about 5 years now, took about a year to get it well populated but still plenty of work to do in order to get it used to it's full capability.

 

We don't employ anybody specifically to do VLE work but make all of the creation of content/managing of pages the job of the teaching staff. There are various responsibilities within middle-management/SLT to ensure this happens, and we performance manage all staff related to ICT as well.

 

Happy to help/show you some of what we're up to if it's useful,

 

Cheers,

 

Tim

[secretlife]

And lancsngfl set it up for us, which i would not recomend.

 

It's a CLEO Moodle, Anthony

[imullings]

"but make all of the creation of content/managing of pages the job of the teaching staff."

 

That is the key. We do do alot on the front page and some general areas but all the courses are done by staff. Give them the tools and the traning and it just takes off. Would they get some one else to do a powerpoint for a lesson!!

 

Ian Mullings

[interele]

Yes, if they could !

[petethetechie]

aint that the truth!

 

now as then.