Loughborough University

I'm an IT Specialist working at Loughborough University. My job is the migration, upgrade and maintenance of the VLE (virtual learning environment). I've been working at Loughborough since 2006 to help deliver and sustain the open source software 'moodle'.

moodle at Loughborough has been named Learn, adopting the name of its predecessor. The VLE currently has 24 departments and extra categories, 3500 modules and 30,000 users.

Learn is hosted on two front end quad core hyper threaded servers with round-robin load balancing. Connected to the front-end servers, the back-end database replicates across two identical servers. The documents and files for the VLE are stored on a fibre channel linked NAS (network-attached storage) managed SAN (storage area network).

Daily I work in a LAMP solution stack environment to develop, maintain and administer moodle/Learn. I've documented and tested various improvements to optimise moodle at Loughborough. I code perl scripts to; migrate resources from the original VLE, interface with Loughborough registration systems, organise and create staff and student assignments to modules, manage ancillary registrations to specialist modules within moodle.

To upgrade and manage the front-end moodle code I've implemented the Git version control system. The development server is setup with a; clean, development, and play version of moodle. This gives the community an area to try things out and allows the testing of developments/upgrades before they're pulled through to the live moodle version. This approach ensures we minimise errors at end user level. We have our own version of moodlecron which manages the extensive task of sending mails and backing up. We've also developed a nice system to quickly and efficiently compare tens of thousands of user records between database systems.

Loughborough University

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