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Moodle Roadmap and Termly Increment Planning

By Jason R Norton, on 1 March 2022

Moodle Logo Image

This post is to layout the near and mid term roadmap for UCL Moodle.

Moodle version Update

UCL Moodle is currently running version 3.9, as we recently announced we will be upgrading UCL Moodle to version 3.11 with a target date of the week commencing 04/04/2022. We will confirm this date via our normal channels once this is locked in by the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Product Team. Details of the changes being brought with Moodle 3.11 can be viewed from this blog post.

Our original intention was to upgrade to Moodle 4.0 during the summer of 2022, however this version of Moodle has been delayed by Moodle HQ and with all the workload associated with a major upgrade we have decided to postpone the move to Moodle 4.x until the summer of 2023. This enables the VLE product team to focus on more value adding work such as Course Life Cycle Tool set which we believe will give more value to our end users than a version upgrade.

Technical work on Moodle 4.0 will commence from our termly increment 4 which starts on the xxx. The extended time will enable our technical and support teams working with our Moodle partner (Catalyst IT) the to fully test the platform, its configuration and our interfaces with other systems.

Once we have deployable version of Moodle 4.x we will create an accessible test instance that that all administrative users of Moodle will be able to log in and explore the new versions features.

Moodle Theme

As part of our upgrade to Moodle 4.x we will also be introducing a new Moodle theme. The Moodle theme governs the look and feel of the whole Moodle site and includes navigation. Moodle 4.x brings changes to its UI/UX experience, and we feel that it provides us with the best opportunity to makes changes to the UCL Theme. Members of the VLE Product are now working on Moodle Theme development with internal user groups, ISD’s web design team and external Moodle partners.  This work will be broken up over the next 16 months and the new Moodle theme will be deployed as part of the Moodle 4.x upgrade in summer 2023.

As the new theme develops and takes shape, we will make available both visual mocks ups and working Moodle instances for our stakeholders to see and feedback upon its development.

 

Agile Delivery and Termly Increment Planning

As part of ISD’s move to “Agile” delivery using a variant of the SAFe Agile Framework, Digital Education has been split into several Product teams.

Moodle is within the Virtual Learning Environment product team with Jason Norton as the Product Owner, Alistair Spark as the Technical Lead and Deborah Okogwu as the Agile Delivery Manager.

As part of this new delivery model the Academic year is split into four Termly Increments or TI’s for short. These TI’s are themselves broken down into seven sprints of two weeks. All work for a TI’s is planned via a series of TI planning days the week prior to the start of the first sprint. During this planning the Product Owner brings a series of high-level features that have been gathered from various stakeholders of the product. These features represent items that will bring value to the products stakeholders, if a feature brings no value to stakeholders, then it will not be implemented. All features that have value are then prioritised during the TI planning and the product team works together reviewing their resource capacity and other metrics to plan which features will be delivered during that TI. The product team then begins to break down each of the agreed features into stories that can be completed within a single sprint of two weeks.

Currently we are halfway through Termly Increment – two (TI-02). The high-level features for this increment are displayed in the image below.

The features are listed in order of priority (red, green, and blue) and during each sprint planning session that priority is used to govern the delivery of the work.

Image showing termly increment planning information for TI-02Virtual Learning Environment Objectives TI-02

Our three key features/objectives for this termly increment are as follows.

Moodle Site Reliability Engineering

Site reliability engineering are a series of principles and practice that are being introduced to the VLE product team to ensure that Moodle reliability, resilience and scalability are being actively monitored. These tools and practices will enable the technical team to react quickly and with knowledge to prevent any degradation of service becoming a user impacting incident.

Wikipedia states that:- Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a set of principles and practices that incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies them to infrastructure and operations problems. The main goals are to create scalable and highly reliable software systems.

Moodle Course Lifecycle

The Moodle course life cycle feature is our large development piece that will span both TI-02 and TI-03. This feature is about making the end and start of a Moodle courses life simpler for our course teams to manage. While at the same time removing the need for an annual Moodle snapshot and the Late Summer Assessment Moodle. This feature we aim to deliver the first iteration of our course rollover tool.

A full blog article with more detail about this will be published shortly. However, in overview the tool will allow a course team to rollover (course copy/reset) any existing Moodle course into an automatically created category structure based on SIT’s data. We will also provide course teams with a tool to lock down an individual course to prevent student write access to the course, at a date suitable to that course and not the entire site.

Moodle Upgrade

As previously mentioned above we will be upgrading to Moodle 3.11 W/C 04/04/22.

Moodle Roadmap Page

We have recently updated our Moodle Roadmap page on the UCL wiki which can be found at this link. We hope that this link will be active within the next two weeks. This page will provide a high level summery of our planned TI’s and you will be able to see the high-level feature document that our Product Owner and Technical Lead (Jason Norton/Alistair Spark) are hoping to take to the TI planning sessions.

 

Virtual Learning Environment Objectives TI-03

Below we provide an initial view into the features that will be taken to TI planning in April for TI-03. These features should not be considered as confirmed until after the appropriate TI planning session. More details about these features will be exposed on our Moodle Road Map wiki page, once they have been prioritised and agreed at our TI planning days.

Image showing termly increment planning information for TI-03

Virtual Learning Environment Objectives TI-04

Below we provide an initial view into the features that will be taken to TI planning in July for TI-04. These features should not be considered as confirmed until after the appropriate TI planning session.

Image showing termly increment planning information for TI-04If you have any questions about this post or wish to raise ideas for developing or enhancing UCL Moodle please contact the Product owner j.norton@ucl.ac.uk

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