Guest – Billy Sneed
- We’re transitioning away from Moodle, but we’re still somewhat reliant on it, even though we’ve migrated to Canvas.
- We can’t totally turn Moodle off. Need to think thoughtfully about what we still need access to in Moodle and for how long?
- How do we keep from disrupting policy and practices?
- Project request was submitted (Billy S. here to speak more to that)
- What do we still rely on Moodle for?
- Faculty need to offer course content evidence up to 7 years back, specifically class activity online. They are being evaluated on how they interact with students online and what students get out of the course.
- No one in the public needs to see any Moodle content, students shouldn’t need access either.
- Content backups (MIIS). Not student data, just faculty content.
- We’re still in transition, migration of course sites is not complete. Faculty need to have access to all their Moodle content so they can migrate it over in the future if they need it
- Tenure review process
- User access management: tenure review committee and faculty would need access
- MIIS doesn’t have tenure review, we have contract review.
- Relatively small group of faculty get reviewed for tenure at Midd.
- Could we use some sort of non-public archival tool?
- There are challenges in moving content from Moodle to Canvas.
- Process strips out user data.
- We may not be able to do this with future versions of Moodle, either. So even if we maintain a Moodle instance, that may not solve the problem.
- Why did we decide to have Moodle be a hosted service?
- We have the resources for this, $ or otherwise
- What’s the cost benefit analysis of a hosted instance or an internally maintained instance?
- It was a political decision – maintaining an instance of Moodle for archival purposes would also be a political decision
- We can’t just export it and keep the data because we need to be able to see how the interaction with students played out
- Another solution: desktop virtualization system
- Adjust authentication settings
- One administrator account
- If anyone needs to review anything, they can pull up the Moodle instance ONLY via that local computer
- If there is only one machine and it’s physically located on the College campus, this wouldn’t serve Monterey
- We need to comply with the policy and keep Moodle pages with student data available for 2 years, the need changes for years 3-7
- December 2018 is when we’ve told the community Moodle archives will no longer be accessible
- Beyond that point, Moodle instance does not need to be accessible to more than 2 or 3 people (Joe, Bob, Amy S). Then we can just add people when they need access for review process.
- We like the idea of a phased approach. One plan for years 1-2 and then emergency/auxiliary access beyond that
- Not sure, but it will be difficult at best to maintain a piece of software like this on a virtual machine for this extended amount of time
- Could AWS host this and handle the patches? Is there a way to fire things up in a hosted environment as needed?
- Moodle is a PHP application
- That’s a lot of data…
- This is why promoting services like Panopto/Google Apps is going to be super important going forward
- Not an obvious win, but could be doable
- Reticent to commit to 7 years, chances are it’s going to break. The more time, the greater the fragility
- Can it be kept up to date for 2 years? 7 years? It’s going to break, then what happens?
- From the web applications side of things, it would be yet another application to maintain, but after initial setup, it won’t need much network. While it’s live, we’ll need to monitor for Moodle security issues that come up and apply patches in a timely manner. Not hard, more of the same, low usage. Probably easier to maintain than most of our other services. Would be a couple days work to get a new VM set up. Then monitoring the mailing list and setting up security patches.
- How much data are we talking about, storage wise? 590GB
- Annual maintenance as of 2015 for 1 TB was $1800 – just for storage (licensing, support, maintenance) doesn’t include staff time or other support pieces
- Immediate needs…
- We need to make sure we are covered for when the “no” gets vetoed.
- How can we treat this as an education opportunity? Can we direct faculty make screencaptures of their courses? No administrator actually wants to go digging around in a Moodle page
- Anyone can install their own Moodle instance on Middcreate
- Faculty need to be more accountable for their data, but they have an expectation that everything will be available.
- There needs to be some shift of ownership to faculty who will need this information, but it’s going to be a slow shift. Policy says the data will be accessible for two years, not beyond that.
- Technology changes – we have no guarantee of what’s going to happen/Canvas’ longevity
- How do we change the culture? Use these two years (until Dec 2018) to work with faculty to move their Moodle data where they need it to go
- About 35-50 faculty at Midd
- To change the culture, we have to constantly keep to policy
- Ties into the growing need for education around how people interact with and take ownership of their data (digital literacies)
- A lot of the time, we don’t take threats seriously until we have to
- Set clear expectations and timeline
- Communicate with list of relevant faculty
- We would need to look at faculty over the past 5 years who are going through the tenure process
- Would still advocate for paying remote learner to host the service through Dec 2018
- Service availability is what makes things complicated – just downloading and storing static data would not be a problem.
- Maybe that’s what we do after 2 years? We’ll export and keep the data, but faculty won’t be able to interact with it via a live service
- In those 2 years, there needs to be good and repetitive communication with faculty about what they might to do to maintain access to the course interaction beyond those 2 years (Moodle hosted on Middcreate, screencapture of course pages, etc)
- Time frame for moving content out of remote learner to wherever it will go?
- Our RL contract is up in August – we’d need to have the new location up and ready to go in August – that’s our deadline
- How long does web team need to make this happen?
- Theoretically, it would take 1 person 1 week to get things up and running. But, web team is going to be short-staffed and has a substantive project pipeline. Other projects and staffing could make things take much longer.
- Push for us to reach a decision by April 1 – this is not a joke (Joe)
- Joe commits to getting the numbers to the group by the end of this week or next week. Joe will work with Billy on the numbers.