Virtual Learning Environment/Three-month plan

This is the project page for the January to March 2014 Wikimedia UK Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) plan.

Those involved are Stevie Benton (SB), Charles Matthews (CM), Doug Taylor (DT).

Tech matters

• Bug 155 (Moodle upgrade to 2.6), assigned to DT, scheduled to happen 15 January.

• Done Took place late 14 January, with some recovery the next day.

Internal links

• Bug 13 (internal links). There is a syntax change and systematic increment of assignment reference number to cope with.

• Done CM has logged as bug 173 (DT).

Consultancy advice is that this perhaps should be treated as a freak event.

Moodle theme

The Moodle theme (CSS skin) on the VLE was broken by the update to Moodle 2.6. DT started again, and asked for advice on design.

• Done SB collaborated with DT to make some changes (24 January).

SSO module

The update has also broken the single sign-on plugin/extension. The SSO is not part of this development plan, however.

• Done Logged as bug 172 (Tom Morton).

Server upgrade

A tech decision (13 January) to upgrade the hosting to include a database server should benefit the performance of the VLE.

• Done Implemented 1 February by Tom Morton.

External consultancy advice resulted in a figure of 8 GB to run Moodle in production mode for 1000 users, giving a picture of what may be needed after a successful launch. Moodle needs plenty of space for caching to run well. CM has advised SB in mail discussion with DT that an upgrade to 4 GB in the WMUK hosting seems appropriate, given that the advice is to set the hardware at an acceptable level, before tuning the system in other ways. Adequate hosting would also mean that other technical ambitions could be restored, that were deferred in discussion in autumn 2013. Synchronous use of quizzes in workshops could easily produce trouble, if the space is too tight. (There is documentation on http://docs.moodle.org, in the form of wiki pages, which may not be so authoritative.)

• Done Moved database to external service

Further performance measures

Besides the hardware upgrade, there are the following:

• OPcache, enabled by Tom Morton;
• Disabling some of the 300-odd plugins. DT has found an admin page on the VLE, detailing them and dependencies.
• Moving to fewer, longer pages. CM and SB agree that this improves the reader experience. DT comments that there is a tradeoff involved, so we need to look into the bottleneck in the new setup to know the effect.

Content matters

CM will work 9 days on this, divided as 4 days on U (Update) work, plus 5 days on Q (Quiz) work. SB will be able to assist on the part of Q that is concerned with uploading quizzes into Moodle.

• CM consulted with SB on 4 February in the office. A prototype of a full lesson was agreed.
• CM finished the quiz writing work on 3 March.