I went to a great event on this leap day at Senate House ‘Moodle 2: Making the leap’ organised by JISC Regional Support Centre. We heard pre/during/post migration experiences from 4 FE colleges who had made the move to Moodle 2.x from Moodle 1.x.
The most striking thing about their stories, and indeed from talking to others over coffee, was the diversity of setups both technical and organisational. The possible combinations of { virtual learning environment + student record system + database platform + ePortfolio } must surely be infinite! As well as that we also saw a range of uses for Moodle from straightforward course delivery to staff CPD to use as a student portal/intranet.
Why were we there? It was all about migration from Moodle 1 to 2 – how to do it? when to do it? what can go wrong? how to engage academics and students?
How to do it?
There are 2 basic approaches here:
- upgrade installation in-situ
This involves replacing the Moodle code old with new and letting Moodle do the upgrade – either via the interface or command line. This seems to be a better option for those with an externally hosted Moodle where there are relatively few code customisations or integrations. The further away your Moodle is from a ‘vanilla’ Moodle the harder this may be so watch out! - start afresh and populate via import
Here a parallel Moodle installation is set up anew and courses are exported from old Moodle and imported to new. At one place a team of 8 staff manually migrated 471 courses in 2 days. This allows an opportunity to clear out old data but users and enrolments will need to be imported separately. When ready you simply need to change DNS settings to point your Moodle URL to the new installation IP address. You can keep the old one as an archive.
The interesting thing here is that there is no clear winner – it will depend very much on your setup and institutional policies on use of VLE. Some places insist on courses being rebuilt every year so for them the fresh install would be the way ahead. Either way both will probably involve a few days (weeks?) downtime while the work is carried out.
When to do it?
The resounding message here was ‘do it early’, probably before your academics go off for their summer hols – especially if you’re expecting them to check and develop their courses in the new Moodle. The start of the academic year is stressful enough so I can definitely see the logic here.
What can go wrong?
Lots! Or maybe nothing. Who knows? It really is a bit like that so testing is the order of the day. For the upgrade option make a duplicate site (and database of course) to test the upgrade process – see what borks it and fix it in your real installation. It could be something as simple as a dodgy filename buried somewhere in the content or rogue code in a label somewhere (paste from MS Word has a lot to answer for!) When testing try and replicate your original server architecture/platform as near as possible.
One college reported that 30% of courses failed to appear in their upgraded version! Whilst you may be able to fix this manually using an army of low-paid summer jobbers (as another FE did) if you are migrating 10,000+ courses then things start to get tricky!
If you have used 3rd party plugins in Moodle 1.9x and these don’t/won’t exist for Moodle 2.x then obviously you will lose this functionality so look at alternatives well ahead of time. The second migration option won’t carry over any users or user data (including glossary data) so you’ll need to deal with that.
How to engage academics and students?
The first step might be to hold mass-inductions (makes me think of Moodle as some kind of cult – maybe it is!) to show the wonders of Moodle2 followed by more personal and practical sessions with staff to cover the areas of major change (file management, navigation, blocks, quiz questions).
Another approach is to get the early-adopters to go over first and show the rest that the water’s lovely, come on in. For students it seems a stealth approach is best – as long as it works and does what they expect they don’t really care what version of Moodle you’re running.
The introduction of a new version of Moodle was used by some as a chance to reinforce the pedagogic principles of the VLE use while for others it was combined with a new swanky theme – you’re going to have to rebuild your theme anyway so why not?
Finally … incentivise! Several FEs who presented today use Moodle medals to award courses bronze, silver and gold standard. Any courses that didn’t meet at least bronze standard were not migrated – harsh but a good incentive for teachers to start engaging. One FE go even further and offer a Level 4 qualification in VLE use.
So, thanks to all the speakers, JISC RSC, ULCC and all people I ‘networked’. The emphasis was on sharing and helping and I personally found it a really useful day – I came away with a to-do list with over 30 ideas so watch out City!
citymoodle 
14 comments
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March 1, 2012 at 11:06 am
Paul Vaughan
Hi there. Glad you enjoyed the day (thanks indeed to RSC London for organising and hosting the event) and I hope you found it all useful. I certainly enjoyed presenting our experiences and finding out much about the other presenters’ college processes and experiences.
The college you’re alluding to in the 2nd bullet of ‘How to do it?’ is us, and I wanted to clarify a point.
Users in our Moodle setup are automatically created at first login (so we don’t do any kind of manual account creation) and we have a custom enrolment plugin which automatically enrols users onto their courses at first login (so only in rare circumstances to we need to enrol students onto courses).
So, adding and enrolling users was never going to be a part of our upgrade process, as the mechanisms to achieve all this were already in place (in the authentication plugin and enrolment plugin, respectively) because of work done previously in Moodle 1.9 and upgraded to 2.x as part of the whole migration process.
We believe very strongly in integration here (indeed, we have a Systems Development manager who is very hot on integration) and we’d much prefer to spend (for example) a month making systems integrate than spend the same amount of time *each year* adding and enrolling students.
Thanks for the positive write-up.
Paul.
Senior Web Developer
South Devon College
(PS. If interested, our custom enrolment plugin is availabe to download here http://commoodle.southdevon.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2&topic=3 It’s a little specific to us and our systems, but maybe of use.)
March 1, 2012 at 2:00 pm
citymoodle
point taken regarding user data – we also have this automated currently in M1.9x via middleware which gets data from our student record system (SITS). Updates are sent through in real-time as soon as they’re made in SITS. However, for those with no integration this holds true – users will need to be imported manually.
March 1, 2012 at 11:52 am
Rosemary Leadley
Great summary Mike. Will be of use to those attending yesterday’s event and those interested in moving to Moodle 2.0 but who couldn’t be there on the day. Will add the link to your post to our own report in due course. Thanks.
March 1, 2012 at 1:32 pm
gshaw0
Nice summary Mike, you’ve beaten me to it on the blog post! Already been pestering our hosting people this morning for a Moodle 2.2 server to start working with next week… the future starts now 🙂
March 1, 2012 at 4:00 pm
Martin Sepion
Nice post Mike – have tweeted and posted out to various lists
Cheers
Martin Sepion
RSC London
March 1, 2012 at 5:38 pm
moodleprof
Great event report, and one I’ll use – thanks Mike.
The Moodle2 training programme that was mentioned is an online module which Jim Judges runs, and is really popular. You can find details here:
http://mahara.ulcc.ac.uk/view/view.php?id=1081 Next cohort starts 16th April…
March 1, 2012 at 10:01 pm
Moodle 2.2 is go! « gshaw0
[…] Was going to summarise the salient points about the upgrade but Mike Hughes has already done it so without further ado check out his post… https://citymoodle.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/making-the-leap-to-moodle-2/ […]
March 1, 2012 at 10:13 pm
gshaw0
A few more thoughts on yesterday…
March 5, 2012 at 9:46 am
Becky Barrington
A really good summary of the day and content Mike!
I am also from the college that used option 2! I would like to add to Paul’s comment and bring it back to the original post that, although the users were always going to be new in our Moodle 2, any returning users who wanted access to their previous year data, would not be able to with the method we used. We mostly have one year courses so this is not a big issue to us and the few courses that needed data from last year I manually restored this information. It was worth it for the few it involved and the greater good (ie: clearing out thousands of users).
Also, regarding the timing, our timing was perfect for us. I personally wouldn’t have considered (before, during or in hindsight) upgrading during the academic year. It simply wouldn’t be possible or fair to our staff and students.
We upgraded end of July. Staff were immersed in Moodle 2 prep from May and when they came back in the summer it was waiting for them. Every organisation will have their own ways of upgrading and the best time for them to do it so the best tip is to look at the big picture and decide when it is best for you (eg: when can you have downtime, when are staff available to support, how and when will it be promoted etc). I can see that upgrading during the summer but only supporting the staff when they returned would be an issue hence the reason for one college wishing they had done it earlier in the year.
For us, it was a whole college event so it worked. For others where the upgrade process is for the teams that do it then they may want to choose a different time of the year / priority.
Good luck to everyone on their Moodle 2 journey!!
March 5, 2012 at 3:18 pm
Mark E
Following this event I’ve been thinking about the need to run 2 concurrent Moodle installations. It would seem that it’s inevitable that we’ll have to do this but we’ll also have students who’ll need to access resources on both. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to run the 2 systems as seamlessly as possible for the users? I think we’ve possibly made life about as hard as possible by having our 19 install on a Windows box while we’re proposing that our 2.x will be Bitnami based…
March 5, 2012 at 4:28 pm
Paul Vaughan
Hi Mark. Off the top of my head, you could use MNet to roam seamlessly from one to the other, and ensure each Moodle has a different theme to differentiate between the two.
March 6, 2012 at 10:12 pm
Mark E
Thanks Paul, I was already looking at MNet and wondering if that was the answer. I meant to mention it in my post but apparently managed to miss that out – however, luckily your telepathic powers have overcome my shortcomings! I’ll pursue this and see where it leads. The themes will definitely be different anyway, our existing theme isn’t especially wonderful so there’s no reason to attempt to adapt it to 2.x. However, I am curious as to why you make a point of mentioning it? Is it simply so that people know where they are or is there a reason I’m missing?
March 7, 2012 at 9:12 am
Paul Vaughan
You’re pretty much spot on. 🙂
I’m thinking of the user experience. I’m of the opinion (and it is just that, of course), that when moving to a different system, it should be quite clear that that is happening. For example, our Moodle has a very different theme to our Mahara, but these are very different systems in terms of looks and use.
In the case of using two Moodles, which have the potential to look very similar to the point that you can’t tell one from the other (and I’m assuming that this may be a problem, rather than a desired outcome) so I would theme them quite differently.
In typing the above I’ve realised that I’m using a heavy bias: when we upgraded we had our main Moodle and an upgraded version running concurrently, and we needed to ensure that staff (and later students) were using the correct one. For your two-Moodle setup, that may not be the case. As I don’t know the reasons for your running two side by side, the user experience may be improved by pretending that they’re both the same system (but could this lead to confusion about where T&L resources/grades are located?).
Hmm, I’m not sure that helped!
March 12, 2012 at 11:11 am
Jeremy
There is some pretty scary stuff being discussed here!
We run 7 Moodle instances with many years worth of content / courses built up serving around 20,000 active users.
We have used both of the methods described above in our history.
I do not think you should even entertain a clean instance “just” to get to Moodle 2.
The kind of reasons I would cite for a complete rebuild would be:
> Clear down old data / start with a fresh database (Moodle databases get bloated over time and are difficult to manage / can develop various problems as they age)
> Organisational changes / corresponding re-structuring of content
The reason I say this is that starting afresh with a new Moodle instance and importing data can be VERY problematic.
We did this a couple of years back with Moodle 1.8, the resons were both of the above, we re-organised and we had a very old database that had developed problems.
It maybe that there are better tools around for migrating content to a new Moodle 2 instance now, but there is still a lot to consider:
When users, courses, resources are created in Moodle they all have an “id”, an incrementing numeric ID.
When you import to your new Moodle instance then the chances are these ID’s will not match, based on the fact you will not want all of your old content, or that content and users are created in a different order.
The result of that is any cross referencing (linking) between courses resources will break, or link to the wrong location.
For example, “resource 99” in the old system may end up being “resource 237” in the new system, and old hyperlinks will need to be updated to the new “id 237” value, and there are a LOT of places where these links can exist.
The only instance where you are going to get a “clean process” is where:
1) Users are automatically enrolled on courses (as mentioned in previous comments)
2) You import whithout user data in the courses
3) Courses, files and resources are NOT interlinked in any way, in which case differences in incremantal ID numbers will not be an issue
To get around the above we had to write serveral migration scripts to clean up the “mess” left behind after re-importing our data which took several days to run.
If you run two Moodles side by side then make one a read only Archive, running to writeable / editable Moodles next to each other is a recipe for trouble.
In our case we add a red banner along the lines of “2010-2011 Read Only Archive” which cannot be edited, thus we ensure all new content / posts, messages etc. go to the correct system.
Again, for the purpose of “getting to Moodle 2” an upgrade will almost always be the preferable option.
The latest Moodle 2 releases (unlike earlier ones!) upgrade pretty well (at least from 1.9x).