Moodle hosting

[Beattie, Shawn]

Hello ASCUE'ers! Boy do I wish I could ask this question on the Water
Oaks patio / Ocean Creek these days, but since we aren't I thought I'd
ask for your valuable input via the list.

Having gone through a difficult term to be self-hosted, we are taking
the plunge and seeking a Moodle hosting service for this year in
advance of a full LMS review. If your school is on Moodle and your
host made it through the Spring semester with flying colors, I'd love
to hear about it. Which hosting solution are you using?

Thanks!
Shawn

[Le Blanc, Jeffery]

Hi Shawn,

We use Open LMS (formerly called Moodlerooms https://www.openlms.net/) for the course along with Collaborate for synchronous learning where desired. It's a hosted version of Moodle with a bunch of extensions to enhance its usage. We pretty much had 100% of our courses already online, both traditional and DL, so it wasn't a stretch for us to move to fully online learning, at least as far as the LMS was concerned. My biggest concern wasn't so much with pushing all of our courses to an online format but rather, would Open LMS handle the load of all the other schools doing the same?

I envisioned a very large increase in user accounts on their side along with the stress that would create on the hosted service. If their user accounts doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled, would it survive? But, we didn't seem to experience much in the way of capacity issues so their service seems to be pretty elastic and tolerant of sudden increased usage.

Collaborate on the other hand has given us some issues so we've started looking at alternatives such as Zoom. It may end up being replace unless Blackboard can get these addressed soon. It disrupts learning so faculty are grumbling about the negative impact it's having on students.

Best of luck in your search.

Jeff

Jeffery A. Le Blanc, M.B.A.
VP for Information Technology
University of Northwestern Ohio
Office: 419.998.3107 | Fax: 419.227.1280

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[Poore, Mark]

Shawn - Roanoke College also hosts our Moodle through Open LMS. We experienced no technical issues with Open LMS either during the pivot to remote learning in the middle of the Spring semester.

As Jeff mentioned, they were formerly Moodlerooms and then purchased by Blackboard and branded Blackboard OpenLMS. They went through a name change to just OpenLMS and a few months later announced they were purchased by a European country.

Our Moodlerooms contract was up last July and we also looked at eThink for Moodle hosting. I was impressed by them. You may remember Courtney Bentley, a regular NITLE attendee. She's eThink's head of support, which gave me a lot of comfort. In the end, Moodlerooms pricing was very aggressive and we decided to stick with them vs. a migration to a different vendor.

Hope this helps!

Mark

[Cullum, Randolph (Ashland)]

When you host Collaborate on AWS, the problems are few.

Zoom has some security issues. I would not advise using it right now

Randolph B. Cullum, Ed.S.

Professor

CIT Program Coordinator

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On Jun 12, 2020, at 8:17 AM, "Le Blanc, Jeffery" <jleb...@unoh.edu> wrote:

Hi Shawn,

We use Open LMS (formerly called Moodlerooms https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.openlms.net%2F&data=02%7C01%7Crandolph.cullum%40kctcs.edu%7C7284015ae9c3401c059008d80eca93ff%7Cf2e339511ec44c72b2bfa4f4671d64af%7C0%7C1%7C637275610511496525&sdata=CIDQ%2FZWy7JA9pdKvxWSytR20EmRXR5v3XitGfwlwtEY%3D&reserved=0) for the course along with Collaborate for synchronous learning where desired. It's a hosted version of Moodle with a bunch of extensions to enhance its usage. We pretty much had 100% of our courses already online, both traditional and DL, so it wasn't a stretch for us to move to fully online learning, at least as far as the LMS was concerned. My biggest concern wasn't so much with pushing all of our courses to an online format but rather, would Open LMS handle the load of all the other schools doing the same?

I envisioned a very large increase in user accounts on their side along with the stress that would create on the hosted service. If their user accounts doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled, would it survive? But, we didn't seem to experience much in the way of capacity issues so their service seems to be pretty elastic and tolerant of sudden increased usage.

Collaborate on the other hand has given us some issues so we've started looking at alternatives such as Zoom. It may end up being replace unless Blackboard can get these addressed soon. It disrupts learning so faculty are grumbling about the negative impact it's having on students.

Best of luck in your search.

Jeff

Jeffery A. Le Blanc, M.B.A.
VP for Information Technology
University of Northwestern Ohio
Office: 419.998.3107 | Fax: 419.227.1280


-----Original Message-----
From: mem...@ascue.org <mem...@ascue.org> On Behalf Of Beattie, Shawn
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 12:45 PM
To: mem...@ascue.org
Subject: [EXTERNAL]: [ASCUE] Moodle hosting

Hello ASCUE'ers!  Boy do I wish I could ask this question on the Water Oaks patio / Ocean Creek these days, but since we aren't I thought I'd ask for your valuable input via the list.

Having gone through a difficult term to be self-hosted, we are taking the plunge and seeking a Moodle hosting service for this year in advance of a full LMS review.  If your school is on Moodle and your host made it through the Spring semester with flying colors, I'd love to hear about it.  Which hosting solution are you using?

Thanks!
Shawn

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ASCUE Members mailing list (mem...@ascue.org) Group URL: https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgroups.google.com%2Fa%2Fascue.org%2Fgroup%2Fmembers&data=02%7C01%7Crandolph.cullum%40kctcs.edu%7C7284015ae9c3401c059008d80eca93ff%7Cf2e339511ec44c72b2bfa4f4671d64af%7C0%7C1%7C637275610511496525&sdata=uXc6PWvGz4J5XL58C2uaIRENNrUHrqUV1WcWWH1AfWs%3D&reserved=0