I am in the process of implementing Moodle at our school.
Here is a little demo of a new Menu system we have implemented. See moodle.houghtonkepier.org.uk/ for main moodle site.
We host our website using DotnetNuke see www.houghtonkepier.org.uk/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx which still needs a lot of content adding
We also use many other tools squid, dansguardian etc etc and save a serious amount of money each year.
I am in the process of documenting the savings to SLT/governors, to show the value we add, by using open source :)
Tim
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By combining a MSft server technology with Moodle (that runs best on Lamp) you are doubling the server skills needed to administer the server room. Can you expand on your choice and explain how all the servers are configured? How many students are typically logged into the system and what do they typically run on the clients?
Hardly doubling. There is going to be overlap and this is exaclty why we should teach transferrable understanding not button pressing in schools. If all the rhetoric about lifelong learning and preparation for technological change means anything we should be producing technologists who can cope with a range of similar technologies without being phased by something new or a bit different.
[quote=J Stephenson]
By combining a MSft server technology with Moodle (that runs best on Lamp) you are doubling the server skills needed to administer the server room. Can you expand on your choice and explain how all the servers are configured? How many students are typically logged into the system and what do they typically run on the clients?
[/quote]
Hmm We do run moodle on a LAMP server, all our Linux servers run Ubuntu Server LTS as it it has a very good reliability record even better than debian! We did use CENTOS previsouly but ut has limited community support compared to Ubuntu.
We run dotnetnuke as our web server because we have to have a Windows 2003 server in our DMZ (this is a stipulation from the LEA) I think that dotnetnuke is very good at creating professional looking web sites. We are in the process of migrating our intranet from dotnetnuke to moodle though. We can have upto 600 concurrent connections to our key servers (which reflects the number of computers, rather than pupils)
The skills I learn for SQL,javascript, CSS and HTML are useful regedless of the IIS/Apache and SQL/MYSQL debate?
I started my career in IT on Unix systems, and was a relucant convert to MS technology at the time. I now enjoy using both sets of technologies and like to think I get to use the best from both systems? The technicians at our school have enjoyed learning Linux skills. Maybe you are halving your skills by just using 1 technology ;)
To summarise I use use dotnetnuke and moodle becuase they are both great technolgies and I enjoy using them both. Dotnetnuke specialises in providing a professional looking website with a corporate style look and feel and moodle is a great LMS :)
Hardly doubling? Well let's break it down:
LAMP and IIS/dot Net are unlikely to be running on the same server, so that's 2 x hardware
The performance monitoring tools you should use to monitor the two server stacks are going to be different, so that's 2 x monitoring tools
The course you book your technicians onto are completely different so that's 2 x training budget
The books you buy to support Lamp and IIS/NET are not in the same covers, so that's 2xbooks
The IT consultant you hire in if there are problems with your server performance are not going to be the same guy, so that's 2 x consultant's fee.
The development tools you would need to make changes to PHP for Moodle are not the same as the Visual Studio IDE needed for dotNet, etc etc
> LAMP and IIS/dot Net are unlikely to be running on the same server, so that's 2 x hardware
Server virtualisation is the way to go here, amoungst other advantages it lets you run different/conflicting application on a single bit of hardware. We use Xen on top of CentOS as out virtualisation solution, which has the advantage of being free and very easy to install (you simply select the "virtualisation" option from the install wizard on the OS install CD, that's it).
> The performance monitoring tools you should use to monitor the two
> server stacks are going to be different, so that's 2 x monitoring tools
Another advantage of virtualisation - you can use a single standard server monitoring solution to monitor each physical machine and see what porocessor / disk / network usage is like.
> The course you book your technicians onto are completely different so that's 2 x training budget
> The books you buy to support Lamp and IIS/NET are not in the same covers, so that's 2xbooks
You're only installing software here, you just need to install it and leave it running.
[quote=dhicks]
Server virtualisation is the way to go here, amoungst other advantages it lets you run different/conflicting application on a single bit of hardware. We use Xen on top of CentOS as out virtualisation solution, which has the advantage of being free and very easy to install (you simply select the "virtualisation" option from the install wizard on the OS install CD, that's it).
[/quote]
I agree most of our Windows servers run on Linux Virtualisation host :)
We are currently using free version of VMWARE server, but I am considering switching to XEN, as it has an open source license for the free version. Would you care to exapand on why you chose XEN over VMWARE.
If you assume that you need a consultant, if you assume that your tech support is incapable of learning anything new without going on a course, if you assume that there is no transfer of skills in programming, fair enough. Actually if you assume all those things it rather shows how broken technolgical education has become and maybe a bigger and more improtant goal is to do something about that.
But, if after all that I still wanted to find an open source content management portal and a VLE that both run on the same technology stack, what are my options? DotNuke does require an expensive W2K3 server licence so I would prefer to avoid it if I could. Even with virtualization you are still running two technology stacks. Virtualization only shares out the performance of one server box between two software stacks - can't see the advantage to the performance.
I'm not quite sure what your asking.
But Apache, PHP, Moodle and MySQL can all be run on a Windows machine - I would advise against that but then I prefer to use FreeBSD, NetBSD or my personal favourite: OpenBSD as the base Operating System.
The advantage of using Apache, PHP and MySQL are that they are platform agnostic.
HTH
Fred
[quote=J Stephenson]
DotNuke does require an expensive W2K3 server licence so I would prefer to avoid it if I could.
[/quote]
In the Feb 09 price list Windows Server 2008 costs us £46.73 + VAT using BECTA pricing which is available to all UK schools (Private and Maintained). Pupil CALs are 0.29p, staff CALS are £3.10. I agree that the CALS can add up.
Hi Tim,
Just had a browse through both sites - looking good, despite tech issues referred to above. I particularly enjoyed the picture of your state of the art IT suite at http://www.houghtonkepier.org.uk/Departments/ICT/tabid/58/Default.aspx ;-)
It is possible, by the way, to run Moodle on Windows Server 2003, IIS and MSSQL, see http://docs.moodle.org/en/Installation_for_Windows_2003_with_IIS . I have some recollection that MS may have helped fund the MSSQL integration.
The remote access Facility eportal stuff looks interesting too - this is a proprietary system, I guess, but I'd be interested to know if you've got anywhere with moodle integration for this. We still seem a long away from the reality of a synoptic view through an MLE, but I live in hope that SIF(UK) will yet provide the open standard that's so needed in this area.
Miles.
Hi Miles,
Thanks for the feedback. Yes the Facility eportal is from Serco, but we are working on allowing parental access via moodle which interfaces with SQL data in Eportal/Facility. ie Attendance, Reporting data can be seen in moodle as well :) Whilst it is possible to allow parental access via eportal, it is great that we use moodle as the front end, as it gives us far more flexibility for what data is shown and avoids parents needing two logins to check moodle and eportal.
Very excited by this, as it puts our moodle system on par with the top end of commercial VLE's out there. If anyone is interested in this I would need to start a new thread, as is a subject I like to talk about A LOT :) We also have access to teaching group data, which makes setting up groups in moodle a piece of cake :) It was opening to the OSS way of working that let me discover several other schools that had already started on this and we know pool our resources to help each other.
Tim
Hi Tim,
I think this would make a very interesting case study, if you could find the time to write it up. There's another Moodle study, to give you an idea of the sort of format we use.
Thanks,
Miles.
[quote=Admin]
Hi Tim,
I think this would make a very interesting case study, if you could find the time to write it up. There's another Moodle study, to give you an idea of the sort of format we use.
Thanks,
Miles.
[/quote]
Will try and get something written up this weekend
Tim
Just answered my own question:
That solves my problem, I can now have both on the same Apache server and avoid Msft server licences.
But, if after all that I still wanted to find an open source content management portal and a VLE that both run on the same technology stack, what are my options?
I'm not quite sure what you mean by the word "portal" but CMS written to run on the xAMP stack are common:
Joomla!, Drupal, Silverstripe, Wordpress and there are loads more...
And you can get the AMP stack for Linux (LAMP), Mac OSX (MAMP) and Windows (WAMP).
For the Moodle VLE, Mahara (http://mahara.org/) might be a solution: e-portfolios plus integration and SSO (Single Sign On) with Moodle.
HTH
We use Drupal, Moodle and our own custom LAMP/AJAX stack for the INGOTs. We might have gone down the Mahara route but at the time it wasn't about. We could add it as an option for choice.
The best-known open source CMSs for you would include Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and Plone. I focus primarily on Drupal, which would be a good tool for you, and is compatible with the LAMP stack, meaning you could avoid the Windows server licensing fees: www.drupal.org
Also take a look at the company Funny Monkey, which develops custom Drupal work for educators: http://funnymonkey.com/