Moodle is an open-source project that anybody can take and customize to their liking. There are many benefits to that! On Moodle’s side, they gain a community of users coming together across different institutions and companies to shape the product. That also offers Hope College tremendous flexibility, in that we can download Moodle and customize it to our needs without relying on a company to tell us what we can and can’t do.
There are many ways for a school like Hope to set up Moodle. Do you put all semesters and courses on one big server? Do you make several servers for every year or every semester?
When setting up Moodle in 2004, it was decided to set up a brand new instance of Moodle for every semester. These semesterly servers are kept frozen in time on a specific version of Moodle and its underlying technologies. This prevents updates to Moodle or updates to the server itself from breaking old courses, as well as helps keep the size of the server down.
The downside to this approach is that CIT usually isn’t applying updates to old Moodle instances… which includes some security updates. If a new version of Moodle or new updates to the Linux server that powers it come along that patch a security vulnerability, that same update also has the potential to change or break old course content. We’ve seen this before. For example, when Moodle 2.4 launched many years ago, it changed the format that courses are saved into the database. If we had updated a pre-Moodle-2.4 server to Moodle 2.4 or newer, older courses would have been completely inaccessible. CIT has always prioritized stability and reliability over all else in the services that we provide. We found the best way to organize Moodle would be to leave old servers as-is and create new up-to-date Moodle servers three times per year.
For these reasons, our past semester Moodle servers are now kept inaccessible from the public internet and are only available while on-campus. This approach is the most secure way maintain these old Moodle instances, and keeps us in compliance with cybersecurity insurance requirements, accreditation guidelines, and general security best practices.
It is possible to download (“backup”) an entire Moodle course into one file and upload (“restore”) it into future Moodle courses on future Moodle instances. Instructions for doing so are available on CIT’s website. Please reach out to the CIT Help Desk (x7670) if you have any follow-up questions!