Moodle at the Open University is approaching its twentieth birthday. For the past two decades, we have been using the freedoms provided by Moodle’s open-source licence to deliver high-quality, customised learning experiences to our students.
To sustain this over a prolonged period (for example more than 30 major Moodle versions upgrades since Moodle 1.6) requires constant reflection on and improvement of the practices and technologies used. People must be organised to work together, and with Moodle core, to deliver the functionality our teaching staff and students need in a robust and maintainable way in an ever-changing environment. It is important to use a wide range of good technical practice, such as code version control, automated testing, deployment pipelines and other forms of automation, but these have to be made to work in practice. However, it is not just technology.
It is also essential to know your users, and so to build systems that they can use easily, and which meet their needs. However, it is not always obvious in advance what people really need, which typically means building something, and then iterating based on feedback working with your users.
In this talk, we will try to give an overview of how we make this work. Nothing is perfect, we are always learning, but perhaps some of the things we have learned could help you?
Attendees will leave with an example of how a customised version of Moodle can be developed and operated at scale, and ways to organise people, processes and practices to achieve that in a robust and sustainable way.