Considerations when upgrading to Moodle 4.1

~ davefoord

Many organisations that use Moodle will probably be using Moodle version 3.9, 3.10 or 3.11, and they will hopefully be aware that the jump to Moodle 4.0 or 4.1 is a significant jump. Moodle 4.1 is what is called a long term supported release, so there would be no sense in anyway upgrading to Moodle 4.0 at the moment, they may as well go straight for Moodle 4.1

Anyone who was involved in Moodle when we changed from version 1.9 to 2.0 will remember that was a huge change that caused a lot of people a lot of stress. The good news is that the jump from 3.x to 4.1 is no way near as big as that was – but it is the biggest upgrade jump we have had since then – so it does need to be taken seriously and in particular enough resource and time needs to be allocated to it.

Moodle 4 has been redesigned to create a better user interface and experience – the consequence of this, is certain things will look very different, and more significantly the way that a course is navigated will be different, which may require some reworking of the courses, to get them to work within the new ideology. For example some course themes that work in Moodle 3, will not work on Moodle 4, or will work differently, and some 3rd party plugins, also won’t work – in which case alternatives for them will need to be sought.

I was recently involved in a webinar (video from this is below) on this topic in conjunction with Overt Software Solutions Ltd where they explained some of the technical aspects of the upgrade, before I came in after about 10 minutes to discuss some of the front end Moodle admin considerations.

The key thing is to get the timing right for this. I expect that a lot of traditional educational organisations (certainly UK ones) will use the Summer break to carry out this upgrade, in which case they need to be starting the process now. One of the key parts of testing, will be getting the teaching staff to check their own courses, and this is the bit that people need to think about. When I was a teacher, I had a healthy allocation of holiday days per year – but I was limited as to when I could take them – which meant I had to take a big chunk of my annual allocation as a 5 week block in the summer, and this was the same for most other teachers – so there is no point in waiting until the middle of July before getting teachers to test things, as they will either be on holiday, or about to be on holiday and not interested in this side of things. Connected to this, is the marking load for the teachers. This will vary from course to course, but typically teachers will experience periods of time in the summer term when they have ridiculous amounts of marking on their plates, and no slack to do anything else – these weeks also have to be avoided. The bottom line therefore for many organisations will be that they probably need to have a ‘teacher testing’ window of about 6 weeks, probably starting by early May at the latest (ideally earlier) – which if we count the time backwards from this date, means we need to be starting the process in the next few weeks at the latest, in order to have time to do this process justice.

Published by davefoord

Dave is an experienced FE and HE lecturer, who during his years of teaching (at Loughborough College), developed and perfected many techniques for providing high quality, innovative, and differentiated learning. Some of his best known work is in the area of ILT (e-learning) - using technology to enhance the learning experience. It is in this area that he has considerable experience and knowledge, and has received National recognition for his practical understanding and skills in this area of work. Dave has run over 1000 staff development sessions on over 100 different learning and teaching topics at Loughborough College, The University of Derby and since going free-lance. All of his sessions are very active, engaging sessions using a variety of different techniques.

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