 Thank you very much and thanks to Jason for your presentation just before now. Sarah and I were just saying that a lot of what you were Sharing we saw ourselves in it and I suppose it's timely that we're up here now to tell you our journey of Our recent Moodle upgrade. I'm Rob. I'm a senior learning technologist at Dublin City University And this is Sarah who is a senior software developer from Catalyst IT So what we're going to cover briefly in the next few minutes is just kind of give you a little bit of background to ourselves in DC And Catalyst and our Moodle setup how we approached planning for our upgrade to Moodle 4.1 We'll go into some detail then on the actual nuts and bolts of our testing and the actual technical upgrade And then we'll just share some reflections on why it worked so well at the end So just to give you a little bit of a background I think you know in any project like this obviously the technology is important The tools are important, the documentation is important but at the heart of any kind of a project at the heart of everything really are people And I think a core reason why this project was such a success was because we operated really as one core project team Both from the DCU side and on the Catalyst side. So on the DCU side myself and my good colleague Suzanne We're project managers and our Moodle support team. We're also heavily involved in the preparation for the Moodle upgrade And then on the Catalyst side there were several people involved as well as you can see there We had Sarah obviously as our lead dev, Sam Taylor as our account manager from Catalyst Natasha was the Catalyst project manager, Paul Walker who's a absolute wizard when it comes to anything and everything theme related Steve as well on infrastructure and there's definitely more people from Catalyst involved as well Nowhere near close to Jason's 500 people though in UCL unfortunately But we were a small nimble team working very closely together delivering a successful upgrade Some of you might have be familiar with DC. We've been using Moodle for about 20 years now or so and heavily involved in the Moodle community Our Moodle is very big and very very heavily used. It's absolutely an emission critical system for the university Obviously it supports student teaching, learning and assessment that goes without saying But we also use it extensively for internal staff training. We use it for student elections and referendums And a variety of other reasons as well so because of that upgrading is important But also because it's so heavily used I think planning and finding the best time for an upgrade is always a challenge And another challenge is obviously how customised we have made our Moodle We've got lots of integrations with other systems including Mahara We've got lots and lots of different plugins available so all of that had to be taken into scope as well And importantly my team, the teaching enhancement unit, we are a centre for teaching and learning so we are not tech experts We're not devs by any stretch of the imagination although we do have a very close relationship with our IT department And of course we have a very very strong and fruitful partnership with Catalyst as well Yeah so Catalyst have been developing customising open source in particular e-learning solutions for 25 years And we're a Moodle premium partner I manually counted 82 Catalyst plugins in the official Moodle repository There was no other way of doing it And there's 196 other open source plugins available in GitHub that you can go and have a look at And we are committed to committing to Moodle Core so yeah there's lots of those being made So as we were approaching this project, certainly on the DC side we had lots and lots of questions mulling around in our heads We operate a system of upgrading Moodle every two years to an LTS version So previous to this we were on Moodle 3.9 and obviously we knew that support was coming to an end So it was time to think about upgrading and deciding which specific version of Moodle to upgrade to And lots of questions around how do we do this, this is going to be a big project How do we prepare for it, who do we need to bring together Obviously DC and Catalyst needed to come together very closely to work But also we have a wide variety of internal stakeholders in the university We've got relationships with plugin developers and people who have helped us customise our Moodle So obviously all of those needs to be brought together as well Importantly we are a small team in DCU and with a very wide range of responsibility So a big question was how on earth do we do all of this on top of our day to day work Both our day to day learning technology work and our day to day academic development work What do we do about our other systems, what decisions do we make about Mahara and plugins And what versions to go to and when to scope those and when to plan and schedule those upgrades What resources do we have, what resources do we need And really crucially what do we need ourselves to know about Moodle 4 Obviously some new changes, some new features, UX, UI improvements coming in Moodle 4 It was really important that we ourselves could approach the upgrade with good knowledge of Moodle 4 in our heads So like how you would eat an elephant we just took it one step at a time, one bite at a time We didn't employ an agile methodology as Jason did We kind of approached it in our own systematic way when it came to the upgrade And we kind of divided out the upgrade into sort of six key phases Scoping, exploring, testing and building for the upgrade, deploying it, making configurations And then providing support for our staff and students afterwards So scoping was hugely important obviously We needed to get approval from our Vice President for Academic Affairs to go ahead We did manage luckily to secure some resourcing to hire a graduate intern When we also secured some resources to explore a sandbox of Moodle 4.1 So that the team ourselves could learn and get to know what was out of the box in Moodle 4 Our testing and our upgrading we'll speak about now in a bit more detail But our systematic approach to that I think really contrary to heavily towards the success of the upgrade as a whole And then wrapping around outside of that then after the core upgrade was done We didn't just cap ourselves on the back and walk off into the sunset But over the course of the summer have been busy upgrading our support resources And providing introductory workshops for our staff This is what our timeline looked like so I suppose Really late 22, early 23 is when we started our initial scoping And engaging with our stakeholders getting our approval And having ongoing conversations with catalysts about dates and processes and so on And catalysts did a high level plug-in review for us as well Which is really useful in helping us make some decisions around what plugins to keep What plugins to switch out to remove what versions to upgrade etc Then kind of coming into the springtime we were very busy exploring our sandbox Documenting kind of different changes that were coming in Moodle 4 Planning our communications and then we entered code freeze I think late April or early May And then really in May was our very very busy period there Very intense two week period of UAT Identifying bugs, resolving bugs or Sarah resolving all the bugs I just found problems and said Sarah please help please fix Which she does do because she's amazing Deciding what our priorities were and so on in June Is when we actually had the technical upgrade so the site was down for three days In order to enable that most of our core and third party plugins were all upgraded But several plugins were updated later And then obviously over the summer we've been busy supporting our staff and students You can have a look at the slides later and there's a link there to our systematic test cards that we use And you may find it useful if planning for your own Moodle upgrade The test cards were originally developed by Aurelie and Sam Taylor And we've remixed them heavily at DCU But we use the test cards to test specific roles and test the most common actions And processes on Moodle and that is a really useful way I think for uncovering bugs And sharing that document with Sarah and the catalyst gang Meant that we could kind of operate out of the same space And quickly identify and resolve issues And again that are kind of ongoing checking with the team To make sure testing was going well and was on track was really important And linking back into what we ourselves had learned in our earlier phase Around what was what's a new behavior in Moodle 4.1 versus what is an unexpected behavior Making lots of decisions on the go about what plugins to keep, what plugins to remove What theme issues needed to be resolved etc But really our three big showstoppers that we said we needed to make sure these worked Before we went ahead with the upgrade was making sure our SAML authentication worked Our text matching integration worked and that Paul from Capitalist could fix All of the bugs we uncovered in the theme But Sarah obviously was hugely involved in resolving all of the various different bugs That were uncovered as well Yeah so the decisions that had to be made were really around 4.1 change So talking to Rob and letting him know which plugins have actually been made to work with 4.1 It was just constant decisions so I've done loads of upgrades in the past in previous roles Working on my own so if I wanted to know If I found a piece of information that I was like I'm glad I found that It was so important to pass it on to Rob so that he could make informed decisions Because at the end of all of this we have a go no go meeting So it was all about making sure that stuff that was really important for a go decision was done before that time And then prioritising things to say well okay that's not great But we could actually wait until after upgrade for that plugin to be updated Or maybe we could update it and push the change back upstream And yeah it's kind of a lot of things to try and keep track of and juggle and let you know about So yeah we basically had you know we've got our internal kind of tracking system But it got to the point where it was so on the fly that we had just like a spreadsheet And we were kind of almost having live conversations in the cells as we went along But then on top of that you know we had weekly check-ins so we actually looked at right Where are we in this process? Let's prioritise this stuff If this isn't done it's a no go you know that one can wait till later And at the same time Paul was looking at the theme it's a child theme of boost You know it's very mature now but again the change to 4.1 meant that we had to make some changes to that And Rob was brilliant in kind of finding things that you know kind of were deep down in the depths of the system that needed fixing And obviously those then went out to all our other clients that have the cat awesome theme So huge thanks to Rob for finding those and getting them fixed On the day of the upgrade itself obviously a lot of the work was led on the catalyst side of things But it was important for us in DC to keep our staff and students up to date So you know they had kind of all hands email going out letting them know we had now entered maintenance mode And again when it was lifted we were again having regular check-ins with catalysts And we were on call ready for the maintenance mode to be lifted so that we could go in and do some deployment And that was kind of the 24-7 call I think it was like 11 o'clock or midnight or something When the site was lifted out of hard maintenance so then myself and Suzanne jumped straight in And had to make a few configurations to the site I think there's about 40 different configurations we had to make some theme things Changing the site colours, changing the language string text and media area back to label Which is the term that all our staff and students are familiar with and so on But the catalyst process for upgrading was very smooth as you can see So three days included a full infrastructure uplift Obviously an upgrade wouldn't normally take three days So you know that was kind of backing up and restoring the database into a new environment And really kind of just giving it a complete uplift And I actually wasn't there for the upgrade on this on leave So that kind of goes to show just how great this was It was so well documented which I think is a really good thing If you're doing an upgrade make sure every single step is documented We did dry runs, we'd already done a test on the UAT site We did dry runs so we had all the timings And Rob could know if there was anything that might cause a bit of a problem Because for you guys you've got very strict times If this doesn't happen there's a problem isn't there So we were really aiming for that go rather than a no go which we got And so yeah the 53 steps that we had documented meant I could go on holiday And the upgrade happened without a problem So I suppose just to kind of wrap up now and share with you Our learnings from this approach I think going back to the earlier slide we very much operated as one team And I don't think you can have a smooth or successful upgrade Without taking that kind of an approach Particularly during the UAT phase and the actual technical upgrade As Sarah was saying we were in constant communication Working out of shared documents documenting things Having information flowing back and forth in good time So that decisions could be made and the task could be advanced So it was really important that everyone was invested and committed And giving time to the project both from the catalyst side and the DCU side I think you need to realise that an upgrade such as this Is a distinct project in and of itself but it takes a lot of time And needs to be committed to We had our six phase approach for structuring it And really I think Cathis is our moodle partner But we are partners in very much the very true essence of the word And partnership is a value that both of us hold dearly and live by And I think that is really at the bedrock of why this was a successful upgrade Yes Thank you