 Buenas tardas, good afternoon. We are excited to share with you our journey while NC State took to deploy Moodle 4 in early 2022. My name is Bethany Smith. I'm the Director of Instructional Support and Training for Delta, which covers all of NC State University. With me today, I have Jeff Webster, who's our Director of Educational Technology Services, and Marty Delberg, who's our Learning Technologies Coordinator. So we have seven members of our Moodle upgrade team, and they represented various groups and teams that would be working on the upgrade. All of us were corralled by a project manager named Christine Belden. Also, there are some other sessions at the moot that NC State has been hosting. We're the last one, so the best one that you came to. But please look for some of the other presentations and poster sessions that are out there. All right. Now I'm going to pass it on to Marty. All right. And I'm the other Martin, just in case anybody wants to know. So I got a better laugh of that yesterday. Anyway, so let's provide a little bit of background on where we started. Boom. No? Yes. OK. So we were working with Moodle 3.9. That was the version that we were working from. And we do self-host, just so you know, we have approximately 2,000 faculty, about 4,500 sections each semester, and roughly, I want to say, about 110,000 enrollments in our courses. So because of that, what we do is we stand up a new instance each academic year. So rather than worry about the database getting overloaded or storage or what have you, each academic year, we stand up a new Moodle instance. And that way, we don't have to upgrade the previous courses instance. We just have to create a current one. And we have methodology for faculty to copy their course over to the new version. So we run kind of three different product lines or three different spaces, if you will. We have a project space and an outreach space. The project space is used for anything that faculty, staff, even students with an advisor can use these spaces in order to further the mission of the university, which is kind of a very broad definition, as long as they're not charging for it. If they're charging for it because of our peculiarities or our state funding, we have an outreach server where they pay a small fee per enrollment in order to use those. Those two get updated in place. And then we have an academic server, which we stand up that new instance each year. So we keep four of them for archival purposes, for data records, whatever that faculty can pull from. So for the upgrade, we typically will have four servers. We will start out with an out-of-the-box stock Moodle four server. And then we have a dev server. So the out-of-the-box Moodle server is just for internal staff. The dev server, obviously, and the test server are just for staff. And then we have a preview server, which is available for anybody who requests access. I think we had a Google form. And anybody who filled out the form, we would set up an account for them. And they could play with their content. They could get a feel for what Moodle four was like. And we made it very clear to them that this was not a final server. We had some integrations weren't there yet, a variety of different things that wasn't quite configured properly. But it was a chance for them to familiarize themselves with Moodle and understand that we were not copying that content over for them, and it was going away once we upgraded. So it was just like a kind of a scratch pad. So our traditional timeline, we start, we upgrade. Basically, we work backwards from May when we start our summer semester. So our traditional timeline is we would start in late 2021. We start going through. We create the new stock test and dev servers, start getting familiarizing ourselves with it. Even before that, we've started to look at what the new features are. We've started to analyze what we don't want to carry over from a previous year. Like if we have plugins that nobody's using, we'll try to get rid of them. And then we have set up our preview server in early 2022. Our academic server goes live in March so that fat code members have two months to get ready or a month and a half to get ready for the summer semester. And we love to do it in the summer because we have about one-sevenths of the load in the summer. So it's a chance for our faculty to kind of get used to it if we have a couple little bugs, little seam issues or things aren't displaying properly. We have a chance to do it at a reduced load. And then our project and outreach servers are upgraded in place when we make the transition over to the summer semester. But we knew Moodle 4 was going to be a big upgrade. We knew that there was going to be a lot going on so we wanted to get started early, even if the code wasn't quite ready yet. So our updated timeline, what we did was is we started looking at Moodle 3.10 and 3.11 to look at what features there were there since we were jumping a couple of versions, start looking at those, start understanding what those were and get ready for that. And then we created that previous server and I think that's okay. So we kicked it off instead of kicking it off in September or October, we kicked it off in August, got things going, reviewed and commented on 3.10, took a look at 3.11 features, got everything running and then tried to get it into a regular timeline. So, back to you. So, because we knew Moodle 4 was so large, we knew we had to have a really big communication plan, especially with the big UX UI changes. Faculty don't like change, even if it's good change, right? They're just, we knew this, we knew this was going to happen and we'll tell you what they actually said at the end. But, so we started really early, right? So when we did our kickoff, we started in August coming up with the first official announcement. There were some screenshots that were kind of out there and then we did a series of planning for some newsletter articles, making sure that every single month they were hearing Moodle 4, Moodle 4, Moodle 4, it's coming, don't be scared, it's awesome. These are the things you're gonna love about it. And from a support and training perspective, we wanted to get ahead of, all right, well, how much work is this gonna be on our team? Like, we have a lot of documentation, we have a lot of things written, we have a lot of stuff. What do we need to do? So we started cataloging all of those existing resources because those we look at ahead of time and know what we're going to be changed. So first of all, we have a public knowledge base. So we knew that we had to look through those knowledge base articles and see which of those were kind of specific to a look and feel. There were a lot of changes that didn't impact our knowledge base because the process might still be the same, but the look or the way to go about it might change. We have a fairly active YouTube channel and in fact, our YouTube channel is probably the most popular thing we did with our Moodle 4 upgrade was created and we'll talk about our YouTube channel, but basically every single video on the YouTube channel had to be upgraded and changed and think about how we would do that. We also have a series of user guides which are more in depth than really a knowledge base article and a lot of those are for some of the things that we have created in-house that are pretty intense and those were gonna need to be upgraded as well. And then at last, looking at our teacher resources website, one of the things we realized that we were missing a few years ago was that we had some really great how-tos but we didn't have any best practices and we decided to keep our best practices separate from the knowledge base. So we created a separate website that was like, so the knowledge base would be like, how do you set up a Q&A forum? And then the teaching resources website would be why would you set up a Q&A forum? And then link to the knowledge base about the how-tos. So when we were cataloging these resources, we have the scariest spreadsheet that may exist in all time, especially to members of my team. So the first thing was, is a revision gonna be needed, right? So cataloging every single item, what needs to be needed, what needs to be changed? Is it screenshots? Is it a complete video? What instructions need to be rewritten? Who will be in charge of updating? We first let people volunteer and then we've all been told to kind of see based on expertise who would be doing different things. And then as managers, we kind of prioritize like what is it that we need? And one of the things we'll talk about on the timeline is when did we need what when, right? Cause that became important. And then the size of the job, right? Like how big is this that I'm asking somebody to undertake? And how can I help make sure that people on my team aren't overloaded with what they have to accomplish? I'm gonna turn it over to Jeff. All right, and so we were going along with the timeline with just the modified beginning and then October came along and the first delay of the code release was announced. And so we started looking through and going, okay, we're not really getting a good message about this code release that it's gonna be the final one either that it's actually gonna come out in late November slash December. So we started making plans of, okay, if it gets pushed again, what's gonna happen? How late can we wait for the code to still make our March go live for the course creations and the may go live for the actual use of the server? So one of the big things we started looking at is, okay, what are our deal breakers? If something happens, what do we have to have? What can slip a little bit? So the biggest thing we looked at are things that were outside of our control. So the plugins that we depend on start checking and seeing if they're mentioning that they're already starting Moodle 4 development based on the development release or if it looks like they haven't even heard that Moodle 4 exists. Look at the support resources. Which ones do we have to have immediately? Which ones can wait? One of the things that we did look at also is which features they were happening in for were far enough along that we could start evaluating them. So the big one, of course, was the quiz bank rewrite. It was not that far along in December and October especially. And so it was, okay, we don't really know what this is gonna look like yet. This is a big problem. We're gonna have to support it. So that's a deal breaker item of, if it doesn't come fast, we're gonna have to look at alternatives. So then we got to January and we didn't have Moodle yet. We're looking at the March date and yeah, that's not gonna happen. We have plugins like the Panopto plugin that is not available yet. We have not gotten enough of our support materials to develop because we've not been able to play with a full enough version. So then we started looking at what we can and we altered with the timeline. We wanna keep our preview server if we can at the February date to get something out there for people to start looking at. Our academic server though launching in March did not look like possible. So we started thinking about other dates. Okay, can we delay that until May? That's a possibility. If we delay that to May, when do we delay the upgrade of the projects and outreach servers? We also started talking a little bit with some of our faculty about, if we pick this date to give you the server to create content on, when could you teach classes on it? If we pick May, they did not wanna do anything on the summer on it, they wanted to wait till fall. We did ask, okay, if we gave you the server in July, would you want to use it? I would say what was it, 80% no? So it was okay, that's off the table. Our small sample does not like that. So we started looking at our new timeline, which was going to be we release a server in May for them to start building on, but we don't go live with it until August. So we have to stay on our three line server through the end of summer. And so we ended up with an updated timeline. So now we've got early 22, we've got the test and development servers up and running. We did actually get our preview server, it wasn't the beginning of February, but we did get it launched in February. Got a lot of great feedback. That was probably the best set of feedback we've ever gotten on an upgrade, because we actually had, I would say 20 or so faculty members actually give us feedback. Normally we get two. And they actually talked about things that some of them were the visual elements, but some of them were functional things that we could actually make some adjustments to. For example, one of the items that we adjusted, we don't use the homepage in Moodle. So we removed that from the menu and just left the dashboard and the courses. Yeah, that was one of the items. We have a parent system above ours called Wolfware, that's sort of the integration of all our tools. They wanted that instead. And so we actually added that link in place of the home link. So little items like that were things that we actually could adjust based on their feedback. And then communications. So then we had to update our communication strategy. And luckily we had not said Moodle 4 coming in March 2022. We were very smart about that. We just said Moodle 4 coming in 2022. So we ended up doing a couple of different things. One was, so we have our different connections and email letters. We started an article series called The Path to Moodle 4, where we looked at a whole series of different ways to look at it. We have a faculty fellows program and all of them, we encouraged and asked them to be like a mini user group, like what Jeff was discussing. They gave us feedback and then wrote an article about what their thoughts on Moodle 4 were. Because having it come from the faculty can be really powerful. We also started to make sure that we disseminated through some of the other channels on campus, going through our provost, going through, we're separate from our Office of Information and Technology. And that was, if there was one thing I think I could have done a little bit different, is we didn't think about how do we advertise this to the students that the change was coming. And maybe that was okay, because I just went through the Reddit threads the day it came out and just watched what happened. But seeing the upgrade news would have been some things that we could have gotten out with the students to let them know it was coming. We were really focused on the faculty. So what do we need ready for the May versus the August date? So I don't know if you get the gravity of this situation. We have never changed our date ever in the history of our self-hostedness since 2010, right? Like, think, yeah, ever. And it was all Marty's idea, totally Marty. Marty's like, well, why don't we just push it back and everybody went, oh, I don't know. We've never thought that way before. But for us, and we alluded to this a little bit earlier, that summer was actually a really big thing. So we had to go through and see, all right. So for what were some of the things we needed for May for faculty to develop courses? And then what did we need to make sure we had an August for faculty to deliver courses? Because those are a different set of plug-ins and a different set of different things that we needed. We also, and Jeff talked a little bit about the preview server, we typically had not done a preview server that was open to all faculty before. And we'd only ever used a training server for all of the workshops that people come to. We will do a preview server from now on. It was huge. It was a great way for our feedback loop. We utilized it in workshops. It allowed our early adopters to get excited about Moodle 4. And it was really crucial for us to be able to create our internal support material. For those of you that are on the training part, we ended up with a three-phase training plan for our in-person workshops. We did a train the trainer model. We were a huge institution. So we know there are a lot of people that help support faculty in Moodle that aren't us. So what we ended up doing was doing train the trainers with them to see how they could help facilitate how to help their faculty and be their support. And then we gave them all of our training materials and said, please help them as much as you can. We did navigating Moodle 4, which was a quick 30 minute. This is your drop-in, quick, what do I need? What do I need to know? Focusing primarily on, oh my god, I just moved my course over and everything looks weird. What are my options? And then moving to Moodle 4, which was the intense two-hour, let's walk through it, bring your course, open lab, we'll meet one-on-one with an instructional designer and instructional technologist to go through what your options were. So train the trainer, we offered that twice. Navigating Moodle offered 10 times with about 105 participants. Moving to Moodle offered five times with 44 participants. No big surprise, people didn't want to come to the big thing. But we ended up doing custom workshops. You know those emails that we sent out earlier? We ended up working with all the different colleges on campus to host workshops in their departments and those were amazing and that worked out really, really well. So we did do our resource updates. So one of the things with this timeline, so we're having summer three-nine at the same time that people are developing in Moodle 4.0, which means we had two sets of documentation that were available and to make sure that it was distinguishable which was which. One thing I'll say for our YouTube channel is we used a Trello board, which was amazing to allow people to grab what video they were gonna be working on and what stage it was in the process and then we would do stand-up meetings to figure out who was working on what. The best thing I can recommend is have a co-working day. We put everybody in one big room and we all played with Moodle 4.0 together in our computers and then when somebody was like, what is this course index thing and why is it called that? We could all talk about that and go through. So one of the things that came out of that was basically coming up with what is our naming convention for everything? Course index, what is our layout? What is a user menu? Block store, all of these were things that were difficult for our faculty to understand because they'd never had to use those before. We also came up with a teaching with Moodle course, which we used in our workshops and then we offered it as a self-paced course that participants could go through on their own. We also use a quick start course shell. So any student or any student, any instructor that starts a new class has the opportunity to start not from scratch in a blank course, but from a shell course that we have offered for them. And so we offered them as a quick start course shell that they could use that was updated and that had to be ready by May. That was the number one crucial thing we had. This is our YouTube channel that we were able to update. We found the most success with our three to five minute videos on each of the different aspects and activities in Moodle 4.0. You're welcome to use all of them. They just look like NC State. So we got 11,000 views that summer. So we were really happy with that content that we added. Gonna move past this because we're running out of time. And then the last thing we did is we'd never used Moodle user tours before. It was just nothing that ever came out. It was perfect for Moodle 4. It was a really great way to showcase where things were, how things were different and where things were located and we created a user tour for faculty and for students. And that was a really big help for us. So I'm gonna turn it over to Marty. Finish it up. Were we successful? Or rather, were we successful? Well, we're here. So I guess we did okay. So by some measure, we definitely were successful. Obviously we were able to get things stood up. We had, you know, I mean, just like developers don't like change when I first suggested that we update, like three months later, the developers were like, you can't do that. Then two weeks later, they had a chance to kind of get used to it and it seemed like a reasonable idea. Our faculty had a great deal of difficulty with the fact that they couldn't indent content. There were some little issues with quiz questions. We had a great deal of difficulty with some of our third party plugins, book publishers in particular. Anybody who knows me knows I'm not a big fan of book publishers, but we kind of have to work with them. So a bunch of them didn't get their 1.3 out till very late. But overall, I think we did okay. I think that there are some aspects of it, particularly with our internal staff, that if I had to do it all over again, I think I probably would have migrated. I think we would have upgraded to 3.11 and then waited the following year and done four, but that ship has already sailed. We're kind of stuck, you can't go backwards. So, but it's worked out reasonably well. We're still having a couple little bugs or little issues, but nothing serious. So that's kind of what I would have done differently. I don't know if either one of you wanted to add anything else to that, but I think I would have waited on the upgrade, but you folks all have the benefit of our pain and suffering. So with that, I'd like to throw it open to questions. So, thank you very much. That was an excellent presentation, big hand for you guys. We have about five minutes for questions, so please raise your hand and I'll bring the microphone around to you. Board, ladies and gentlemen. Anybody but Ted. Thank you. Anyone, oh, I just wanted to know what your top two major pain points were. So from the training support side, the biggest pain point was that the people that had the best looking Moodle courses that had put the most work into their courses had so much work to do in Moodle 4 to make it look better, especially with the indentation change, whereas those that had the worst looking courses that were just like really, really bad just moved over fine. It was really frustrating. Oh, so I think that was a big pain point. And so we ended up creating a lot of resources of here are the five options that you can do to change what you can do, but it was an educational thing for us from a tech side. So I guess from the tech side, but we had probably two. One was unfortunately the new quiz and versionings was not perfectly done. There were some parts were not quite looking at well-indexed tables and there were a few quiz question types that just weren't quite ready for multiple versions. The other one, there were a few with, I think this was related to switching them to the new reports. There were a few of the reports that weren't the best SQL. There were some issues on the participants page where it was running some additional stuff it didn't need. Once after about two days of tracking down the issue, they actually found it removed some extra JavaScript and some SQL and it went from like five minutes to five seconds on loading on certain classes. Both of those released all the five issues that I know of that we had open. They're all being either worked on to be in 401 or actually being back footed or ported and it looks like they're gonna be in 405. So they are fixes out there for them. I'm glad you mentioned user tours were very useful. Are you maybe willing to share this? We would love to share. So by the way, everything we shared, everything we taught or trained, do you want anything? Like email me and we'll send it to you. We've got great handouts. But user tours were interesting, especially with Moodle 4. Things were not exactly where we clicked for them to be. So for the user tours, I definitely recommend being more broad and not specific in your user tours for Moodle 4. Thank you very much. On the course page, we usually have a right bar or the right bar that is now hidden in the version four by default. Is that correct? And how do you get around that? When you have the course page, you have the content in the middle and some sort of blocks on the right. And that is by default hidden in the version four. How do you get around the kind of missing information on the course page until you click on the... Right, so the block doors closed and the course indexes closed. And those things are user dependent. So even if you as an instructor open them, it's not open them for your students. So that was a really, really big thing that we've talked a lot about in the 30 minute workshop. Like you're going to have, if you keep stuff in blocks, you're going to have to tell your students that it exists, right? That was a really big part of that decision is having them. We encourage all of our faculty to have walkthrough videos or a welcome video to show how to use their course and have them navigate their course. And that's a huge, I think aspect of it. I'll say two to that note, the course index. Like when you're editing, you have different stuff in the course index than when you're not editing. And so there were a couple of different things with the course index and how we named things that we also worked with faculty on. Student preview. Student preview always is a good thing. The last thing I'll add, because we're done all of the images that we're using is we're either created by NC State or we're creative commons images from the NAMM project. So thanks for having us.