Moodle Upgrade completed

IS Applications recently completed the project to implement the annual upgrade of Moodle, the University of Edinburgh's centrally-supported virtual learning environment for online distance learning programmes.

The project successfully delivered the upgrade of the Moodle platform to the latest version (3.0) as planned and the deployment was reported as being a straightforward one with no reported issues. This latest upgrade ensures that the University's instance is kept up to date with community supported software releases from Moodle in 2016.

The project delivered each of the following:

• Current functionality (including plugins) work as expected
• Themes and templates are fully compatible with the new functionality
• New enhancements resulting from the new version are fully available to users
• There are no issues with maintaining current data quality
• There are no negative changes to the current data quality
• User help and guidance documents are updated
• Project documents can be added to the knowledgebase to assist future upgrades

As part of this year's project the team were asked to review the capacity of the platform bearing in mind anticipated growth, and to review the disaster recovery plan. Capacity and load tests showed that the platform is expected to remain performant and responsive if a much higher load than normal is experienced; the disaster recovery plan was reviewed and a test recovery was successfully carried out to validate the integrity of the process.