IT developments and solutions from the IT Student Experience team.

Preconfiguring emergent disruption in an agile way.

Monday 13 June 2016

Moodle 3.0 upgrade

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It is time for our Summer Moodle upgrade again!
On June 27th we will be upgrading to Moodle 3.0.3 (from 2.8). While the number is a big jump the differences in the platform are not too large and so should have a minimal impact on students and staff. Most of the improvements, bug fixes and security updates are internal and will not be directly noticeable.

As with the previous upgrades there will be up to one day of read-only access while the upgrade proceeds (i.e. no Turnitin submissions, course editing, forum posting etc).
Read only access will be from 09:30 until completion, sometime before 17:30. There may be a brief (less than 15 minutes of outage while the final switch over is performed).



Moodle 3.x upgrade

On June 27th 2016 we will upgrade our live Moodle instance to version 3.0.3
This will bring stability, security and performance enhancements along with upgraded integrations and plugins.

Note: we will also have Mahara upgraded to 15.10 at the same time.

Upgrade plan

It will take between 4 and 7 hours to upgrade the platform. We will plan for the Moodle site to be in read only mode from 09.30 until 17.30.

Process carried out by ULCC

0. Internal upgrade test run two weeks before actual upgrade. Any external access (firewall, SFTP) configurations are updated.

1. On the day of the update the site is placed into read only mode at 09:30

2. A clone of the site is taken and copied to new infrastructure

3. Update is applied to the new site

4. Site is checked by ULCC Support team

5. DNS switch is performed by ULCC so that the current site is switched to the new upgraded site. I.e. moodle.brookes.ac.uk goes to new site

6. Admins are added back in and site is taken out of read only mode

Note: there may be a brief (<15 minutes) outage while DNS is switched over.

Backup out Plan

1. If an error is encountered during the update they will restore service from the backup (this is allowed for in the planned downtime)
2. Post analysis will be run and new update date will be arranged

What is new in Moodle 3?

Navigation Changes
Since 2.9 Moodle has improved the UI for user profiles and homepages
My home is now Dashboard
More information can be found here https://docs.moodle.org/29/en/Dashboard

New Grades page
Students can access an overview of their grades in all courses via a Grades link in the user menu (top right of each page). This lists courses they are students in under the heading ‘Courses I am taking’. If a student clicks on a course name, they will be taken to their user report for activities in that course.

Themes
Adaptable and Klass themes added

Atto Editor
Now includes math notation
Keyboard shortcut (ctrl+K) for hyperlinks
There have been improvements in adding and configuring tables when editing text, plus there are new equations in the equation editor

Under the hood
Improvements to web services, mobile services and administration of file resources.


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