Moodle 2.0 - Major differences?

[TechMonkey]

Any one that has upgraded to Moodle 2, was it a huge leap for your staff? We are just about winning to get staff to use it and I am tempted to upgrade over the summer to add some of the new features but fear the up roar when they find things look slightly different or what they have found doesn't work anymore.

[Theblacksheep]

2.1 now!

[TechMonkey]

All right smarty pants

[danbuntu]

It's different enough, if you just upgrade your not going to make any friends. Best bet is set up a seperate moodle 2.1 install and use mnet to link the two together. then put some training resources and sample courses on the new 2.1 install so that the tutors can log in and take a look. This will let them have a play and get used to moodle 2.

[Theblacksheep]

All right smarty pants

 

I've not used it before, we've just started installing 2.1.... so sorry my reply wasnt the most effective!

[PotNoodleTech]

We've been struggling with this very topic all week.

 

We have just now had to make the decision to restore our 1.9 site from backups as we have a couple of departments who have instructed pupils to use the VLE content next week. So the site has to work next week.

 

I am really disappointed to be honest, we are desperately trying to move things forward here, I am the NM and we also have a teacher who is our moodle champion and has spent all week documenting the differences and bugs that we have encountered. There are many small but often significant changes / differences - I will pass everything we have found on to you guys and gals next week.

 

The main reason we have had to postpone the update pending more testing is we have been plagued by infrastructure and theme problems.

 

Firstly the infrastructure. We do not host the moodle internally; it is hosted by our LEA. They host all of the moodle sites for all Secondary’s, Primaries, Colleges and Libraries. This means their back end set up is already very complicated, and security policies that have been implemented on that back end complicate things exponentially and have given us several unexpected hurdles that perhaps other schools would not have had to come up against. The main issue we have has is that Moodle2's HTTPS implementation (i.e. it is different to 1.9s HTTPS implementation) appears to seriously conflict with the LEA's ISA setup. We've tried all sorts and every time we made progress something slightly further down the chain has been affected. We may have found a solution to fix our moodle 2 site but then that fix would have adversely affected the other moodle 1.9 sites in the LEA. The main problem is we can't make sweeping changes to their ISA set up without possibly affecting many other schools. This has been the main factor in now having to roll back to 1.9. I think a LOT of fiddling and testing will need to be done before we can move forward on this.

 

The second issue we have run into is that of themes. I implemented a two stage test for themes that we designed / altered in house. The first was a local copy of moodle 2 installed on my ICT Tech's PC. She use that local copy to initially develop and test the theme. I also arranged for the LEA to make a copy of our site on their system with a different URL (that broke some images and links etc of course) but that was the second stage of testing the theme. Once happy with our local copy we would upload to our LEA copy, and once happy then we could use on the production system. You'd think that would be enough - but the first theme she created well in advance of this upgrade we tested locally and at LEA level and all was sweet as a rose. Upgrade time comes? Hey presto the theme which worked on all test systems suddenly does not want to work on the production system and in actual fact it ended up taking the site down as it blocked us from logging in to the site at all! LEA had to manually reset the theme back to normal. We tried again with that theme and again it broke our production moodle.

 

Ok so my tech quickly modifies the colour scheme on an existing theme and tweaks it with our school logo etc on her local copy. We get it how we want it and are pleased. We go to upload it to the LEA moodle's and once again, the theme breaks the site for no reason we can see (this one ended up showing nothing below the main menu bar). Yet again even with as much local testing as we can fit in the theme gets the better of us when moved to production.

 

Overall - I am very disappointed. The problem is it's not possible to replicate such a large and complicated system as the LEAs set up properly in house to enable us to do more meaningful testing. We can do all the testing we want in house but when it comes to actually uploading it to the LEA system all bets are off as to whether it will work. This is frustrating for me, my technician, very frustrating for the LEA moodle guy who's been working his little socks off (including from home in the evenings!) bless him. Frustrating for my moodle champion who has spent as much time as possible this week testing the Moodle2 system, identifying bugs and also identifying new features and also ways we can make the system work better for us, only to then get to 4pm Friday and roll back to the old system.

 

We'll be having a meeting with the LEA next Thursday to really flesh out how we are going to move forward and get around these major problems.

 

I think all thee of us could seriously do with a dose of Eduhobnobs and maybe a cuddle. Cuddles always help.

 

Yours

 

a tired and emotional NM.

[witch]

 

sounds awful! But most of your problems seem to be with the LA side of things. Their system sounds unusually complicated.

Is there no way you can host it yourselves? We are only a smallish middle school with one server but we run moodle on it with no problems.

We have upgraded to the latest moodle and apart from the actual upgrade being a pain, all is well and the teachers are OK with it. The head of ICT had to re-do the theme but other than that all seems OK.

 

I hope things get better! Have an eduhobnob and some edujd

Edited April 14, 2012 by witch