MCPSS Moodle

The scheduled maintenance is complete and Moodle is up and running, with plenty of elbow room! File upload limits have been increased. Thanks for your patience as we work to make your Moodle experience a good and useful one.

Moodle.mcpss.com will go offline for a couple of hours starting about 3:30 today. Please make sure that you have completed any work and logged out by 3:20. Sorry about the inconvenience (again), but at least this time it is planned and is for a good reason - we are getting a lot more space for Moodling! File upload size limits will be increased soon.

I hate that most (if not all) of the announcements lately have been about things not working. You must be tired of hearing, "It's not Moodle - it's the equipment". It is hard to resolve a difference between the content and the medium when the lesson you had planned is hijacked by a bunch of silicon and electricity. In the case of the login problems on Friday and Intermittently on Saturday, it was sort of a combination of both. In the course of making backups of all of the courses and associated data, Moodle filled itself up. To the rim (if servers have rims), packed down, and leveled off!

But - in the long run, anyway - this is a good thing! It demonstrated that you and your students are using this fantastic (and free) resource at an ever increasing rate, and, as a result, our space for Moodle is being greatly increased.

This increase, however, is not yet complete. Moodle is still very full and a little fragile because of that. The size limit on file uploads has temporarily been greatly decreased to help avoid the same problem. The site may need to be taken offline (Monday morning would be likely) to compete the expansion. We will try to post a notice on the front page to give you as much notice as possible if that becomes necessary.

Hang in there! Moodle is a great tool - collection of tools, really - and promises to just get better as we bring more features online and learn about the ones already in place. Feel free to send me your questions, comments, and concerns.

For all of you who have been inconvenienced by recent network problems - thank you for your patience! There have been some technical difficulties with the device that handles a big chunk of the network services in the district, including Moodle. You may have noticed that, while Moodle was down, many email accounts and IP telephones did not work - or didn't work correctly. As these issues come up, they are being addressed as quickly as possible, I'm sure. Many of you are using Moodle more and more, which is great! Please continue, and while there will inevitably be problems as the MCPSS network improves and expands, we hope that those problems will become increasingly rare.

There was another episode today with the network appliance that houses Moodle and a few other things. If you visited Moodle during the downtime this afternoon, you were likely greeted with a Fatal Error message. You may have noticed problems with the IP phones and email, too. It was a fairly brief outage, thankfully, and Moodle should be up and running now. We do apologize for the inconvenience - and thank you for your patience.