small Moodle logoA little while ago LSE decided that it would stick with Moodle 1.9 and not move to Moodle 2.0 for the academic year 2011-12. The LSE Centre for Learning Technology (CLT) started looking at Moodle 2.0 pretty much as soon as the first usable beta version was released. At that stage we decided on a number of criteria that needed to be met before we would make the decision to upgrade during summer 2011. We needed to make the decision at least by our Easter break so that we would have time to implement the upgrade and design and provide any training that might be required.

The decision not to upgrade was made after some criteria had not been met and CLT testing concluded that Moodle 2.0 wasn’t ready to go into enterprise level production at LSE. The main blocking factor was the lack of readiness of third-party modules that we use and rely on. Aside from waiting for them to be released we would have also needed to implement a testing programme for these before we would have felt confident in going ahead with the upgrade.

During testing we of course also discovered some of the significant changes that Moodle has undergone from 1.9 to 2.0. The main one that we felt would affect the user experience is that of file management. In light of these changes and the fact that we have chosen not to upgrade this year we can now look at other alternatives such as integrating a repository system with Moodle. It will also give us extra time to look at using the new web services in Moodle 2.x to integrate with our student management systems at LSE. We now hope to upgrade during the summer 2012 break. And no, this isn’t an April Fools’ day story.