Welcome to the final Learning
Systems Update of 2012.
We’ve just rounded off a very busy and productive year for the
learning systems team by releasing a major VLE update.
A major part of the update was moving the system underlying the
VLE from Moodle 2.2 to Moodle 2.3 – giving us a lot of new functionality
associated with the newer version of Moodle.
We’re also adding in a lot of new local OU features – some of
which I’ve been promising for several months.
There are quite a number of improvements related to quizzes
We’ve added a long awaited feature that sends a reminder email to
students who have attempted a summative quiz but haven’t remembered to submit it.
We’ve added a number of new administrative features to the quiz,
and we finally get STACK questions as part of the Moodle quiz. This will dramatically improve our ability to
both assess and teach mathematics online.
We’ve already done quite a lot of
publicity around this, but if you want to know more or see a demonstration
contact me, or Phil Butcher or Tim Hunt.
Our structured content tools get a number of improvements too
We can now produce ePub3 interactive eBooks – so we can better
support learners with iPads, we’ve improved our support for videos, and we have
also improved our systems so that we can handle very big files more
efficiently.
There are also the VLE enhancements that we need to allow users of
the soon-to-be released OU Anywhere apps to get their course materials.
As always there are release notes on the Online Services website
that will give you chapter and verse on both the new features and existing
features in the VLE.
Availability and performance levels for the VLE continue to be
good for the both the old and new VLE platforms, and we are seeing approximately
5M transactions each week almost all on the new VLE and something like
40-50,000 unique users visiting us in any 24 hour period.
As we move into the New Year there will some big changes for the
learning system team.
We’ll be completing our development work for the March VLE update,
and we’ll also be starting to do some of our preliminary testing of Moodle 2.4,
in anticipation of moving to that as part of the June update.
In addition, In January I and the learning systems team will be
moving from Learning and Teaching Solutions to join the IT Development team. This will ultimately mean quite a lot of
changes to the way we work.
However, while I hope in the short term the change won’t be
apparent to any of our users, it will, in the longer term, enable us to both develop
and support our systems even more effectively than we do at the moment.
