Moodle and Web 2.0

Updates, upgrades, new features, new development… these are just a few of the many tasks that need to be done in order to keep your Moodle experience fresh and compelling.

It is always good practice to schedule routine maintenance and upgrade events during times when the fewest (or no) users will be accessing the LMS (this, obviously, isn’t possible in the rare emergency event). The best way to ensure users are not on the system during these periods is through a high quality communication strategy.

During the maintenance period, it is also a best practice to set your site into Maintenance Mode, to prevent anyone except administrators from accessing the LMS. From Moodle.org:

An administrator can put the site into maintenance mode in Administration > Site administration > Server > Maintenance mode.

Users accessing the site when it is in maintenance mode will continue to see a normal homepage, but they will receive a notice that the site is currently under maintenance if they try to access course materials. (Note: this message to users can be customized to best fit your site and style).

Knowing how to set up Moodle courses is essential for any and all Moodle LMS administrators. You can only add new courses if you have Moodle administrator, course creator, or Moodle manager rights.

1. Log-in to Moodle. Go to Administration>Site administration>Courses>Manage courses and categories

2. Go to the category that the new course will be living in.

3. Click on the link that says “New course”

4. Now you ready to fill in the following course settings.

Here’s the scenario: You are about to setup your Moodle LMS installation, and you aren’t sure where to start, what to consider, or what you should know. The good news is if you are outsourcing your Moodle hosting - which is the recommended method - the Moodle installation process will be taken care of for you. Moodle hosting vendors, like Lambda Solutions, help take away the headache of installing the site on a server, and remove stress surrounding the optimization of your Moodle site's performance.

Regardless of whether you have outsourced hosting or not, it’s best to have a good understanding about what is involved in the Moodle process. This guide is a compilation of step by step directions, best practices, and tips designed to assist users who are about to install their first Moodle site, but it also provides great background information if you are a more experienced Moodle user.

Moodle is an open-source e-learning platform (aka Learning Management System) that is widely adopted by educational institutions to create and administer online courses. For larger student bodies and higher volumes of instruction, moodle must be robust enough to serve thousands of learners, administrators, content builders and instructors simultaneously. Availability and scalability are key requirements as moodle becomes a critical application for course providers. In this blog, we will show you how to deploy and cluster moodle/web, database and file-system components on multiple servers to achieve both high availability and scalability.

We are going to deploy moodle on top of GlusterFS clustered file system and MariaDB Galera Cluster 10. To eliminate any single point of failure, we will use three nodes to serve the application and database while the remaining two are used for load balancers and the ClusterControl management server.