NC State Enterprise Learning Management System (LMS) Updates

LMS Committee Updates

LMS College Needs and Policy

The LMS College Needs and Policy Committee met regularly through the spring 2011 semester and had our first fall meeting August 31, 2011. All of our meeting minutes and supporting documents are available at http://moodle.wolfware.ncsu.edu/course/view.php?id=2001 for the NC State Community. To date during this calendar year, this committee has completed the following tasks:

• In collaboration with the College of Veterinary Medicine, investigated the use of the Local Admin access role in Moodle, which allows designated local administrators some control over managing courses in their designated college category. As part of this project, the committee drafted a report on the experience of the pilot, and has created a MOU that must be signed by all who have this access. During the next calendar year, only a small number of individuals will be allowed to have this access as we continue to understand how this works.
• Created Standard Operating Procedures for Announcements and Manual uploads. All SOPs can be viewed at: https://wolfware.ncsu.edu/sops/.
• Discussed and moved forward requests to the LMS Steering Committee regarding new features in the LMS. Upcoming work for this committee includes, but is not limited to, working with the other committees to create SOPs for the use of project space, for retention and backups, and for various roles (e.g. evaluator, etc.) in Moodle.

LMS Best Practices and Support

Over the last six months, the Best Practices and Support committee has been focused on responding to feature requests.

• We worked with DELTA to get six plug-ins installed on a test server, then investigated and evaluated them.
• We worked with the DELTA Faculty Development group to define the support needs for the new features and made plans to have some support ready at roll-out for the features that needed it most and then to develop more support along the way.
• We did preliminary research on a number of other modules to determine whether they would provide the features that were requested.
• We worked with DELTA’s Applications Development team to evaluate all of the Bug Reports that were in the Feature Request tool and made some initial decisions about which ones needed to be fixed and which ones would be documented as Known Issues.
• We decided on the next four modules that will be installed on a test server for evaluation and also created working teams to provide recommendations that will address several other high priority Feature Requests.

LMS Technical Concerns

The LMS Technical Concerns committee has worked on several projects this year.

• We developed our review workflow and criteria for Feature Requests.
• We evaluated and approved the initial six feature requests we received.
• We began discussion of LMS roles/permissions and how they relate to other systems on campus. The goal is to have a defined relationship between the roles/permissions in the various systems on campus, at least when dealing with courses.
• We began discussions of backup and especially retention requirements for the LMS components

LMS Steering Committee

The LMS Steering Committee has been busy reviewing recommendations from the three working committees as well as getting updates from DELTA staff to ensure that the strategic direction of LMS improvements is in sync with the needs of the University. All of our minutes and meeting agendas are available at http://moodle.wolfware.ncsu.edu/course/view.php?id=2242.