Moodle is a comprehensive classroom management solution that allows professors to communicate with students, share course content, manage submissions and process grades. It is currently used in SoCS for a select number of number of courses as an alternative to Courselink (D2L) due to its ability to be customized whereas Courselink provides a standard experience. Students are able to sign up for classes using a course specific enrollment key to get access to course material.

Moodle is hosted on a VM in the SoCS datacentre and is available at moodle.socs.uoguelph.ca to SoCS student and Faculty, although access to specific courses is restricted to users of those courses.

To upgrade moodle, the following workflow is recommended:

1. Go to the site administration page on the moodle website (you must be in the mdladmin LDAP group to have access to this page).
2. Access the maintenance page from the server section and set the website to maintenance mode. It is recommended to do this step when site usage is low.
3. On Proxmox, create a snapshot of the VM updates can be easily reverted.
4. Login with root access to the moodle server through SSH, update all packages every now and then through aptitude.
5. Navigate to “srv/www/moodle” and do a git pull to receive the newest source code for the current version branch (version can be checked with git branch -v).
6. Access the moodle website and follow the prompts to follow through with the update. If specific required dependencies are missing then SSH into the moodle server and install them.
7. Once the upgrade is done, go back to the site administration section and turn maintenance mode off.
8. It is good practice to reboot the moodle server at this stage. The upgrade is now completed. You may choose to delete the snapshot in step 3.

To look into versions and release schedule, access the following link: moodledev.io/general/releases